Well, I am unsure about what you mean by properly encoding them. The variables write fine into MySQL and into the web pages I am producing. Just not to the actual file. For instance, further above in the subroutine, I utf_escape($title), because I do some processing on the file before I save it, and the program I use doesn't like funny names. But I figured there should be no problem writing the filename, because my filesystem can certainly handle utf8. But perl/mv seem not to be able to write it directly. Amiri