in reply to directories and charsets
I think it depends on how are you using the CIFS sharing. As far as I remember, Samba had some configuration about that. Traversing the directories should be transparent for you, AFAIK.
About the utf8 flags and Encode, you should avoid using that. Use use utf8; if your program was written in utf8, just for that. Perl should translate that for you automatically on most cases.
Igor 'izut' Sutton
your code, your rules.
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Seekers of Perl Wisdom