Well, I'll have to take your word for that. If true, then Perl does not deserve to be used on Windows. Telling people to use 8.3 filenames at this stage of the game is a sad admission of defeat and a poor implementation.

Yeah, that statement is worthy of expletives Loops, but if we the win32 users don't despair, neither should you :)

Since the beginning of windows, cmd.exe did not come with unicode by deafult... and cmd.exe is at the root of every application, its documented in perlport ... we users of win32 know there is always a little extra work to accommodate out platforms, we're better at portability programming than non-win32 programmers :)