I believe here is the shortest expression of what the problem might be : 
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use strict;
use warnings;
use Encode;

my $topdir;

    if (scalar(@ARGV)) {
        $topdir = shift @ARGV;
    } else {
        print "Enter top dir : ";
        $topdir = <>; chomp $topdir;
    }

    warn("top directory [$topdir] : ",(Encode::is_utf8($topdir) ? '(ut
+f8)' : '(bytes)'));
    unless (opendir(DIR,$topdir)) {
        die ("Could not open it : $!");
    }
    closedir DIR;
    warn "everything ok";
    exit 0;

[download]
If you try this in a Windows command-line, after creating a directory with a non-ascii character in the name (suppose "München" for a change), and try it consecutively as :
perl testutfdir.pl dirname
and
perl testutfdir.pl
you should see the kind of problem I'm having.

This might be the deep cause of my problems, because in the real program, I am getting the name of the top directory of my tree by parsing a parameter file, and they come to perl as utf8 strings. But the subdirectory names that I read from the disk, come in as bytes. Now when I concatenate both to get a full filename, I believe I have a problem.

In reply to Re^2: directories and charsets by soliplaya
in thread directories and charsets by soliplaya

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