... if anyone thinks if it worth it (or if it isn't) please share your opinions.

Yes, I'd say it's definitely worth it. You could make a little girl a little happier... if that does mean something to you :) — Ok, seriously, if you have the time to look into this, please go ahead!

IMHO, some way to conveniently handle different filename encodings is the only missing component in Perl's otherwise excellent support for unicode and other encodings.

Personally, I would favor a generic, platform-independent solution, where you can simply use a pragma to specify what encoding the filenames are in (in a particular environment). Of course, one would somehow have to account for the idiosyncrasies of the individual platforms. For example, on Windows it would probably make sense to take advantage of the magic that the wide-char conversion functions do offer when fed with the right parameters. Apart from that, I think less magic is more, i.e. no auto-detection of encodings and stuff like that...

Actually, I've been meaning to come up with a patch myself, but I have to admit I haven't got around to it yet (and the temporary workaround based on USING_WIDE in fact works quite well for what I was primarily in need of...)