Thanks everyone for all the great replies! Sorry for the long delay in responding; got a fresh newborn over here. :-)

I tried most of the methods suggested; graff's idea of using Unicode::Normalize and a s///g works well, but I eventually went with moritz's Text::Unidecode for simplicity: it does exactly what I want in one step. ++ to both you guys!

@DrHyde: You may very well be right about the encoding issues. I do have to transfer (occasionally) between Linux and Windows machines (although less and less Windows these days), so perhaps that was the source of the problem. I just decided it was easier to strip the accented characters for the filenames.

@jeffa: Sure, I knew I could use tr, but I was looking for something that wouldn't require me to anticipate every international character I might run across. So far, Text::Unidecode is working great for me.