Since you are taking "general purpose", here is a little routine that handles a commonly appearing problem now-a-days, where your encoding can't handle special (but legal) characters in filenames. It won't affect anything, if the filenames are normal ascii, but will fix them, so Perl can find them from the filesystem, if there is a unicode character in them. I was shown this, when I had a problem opening files with Perl, which had names like Claude Gellée , where the funny é is actually an acented e. See Re: problems with extended ascii characters in filenames

 #this decode utf8 routine is used so filenames with extended 
   # ascii characters (unicode) in filenames, will work properly 
   use Encode;
   opendir my $dh, $path or warn "Error: $!";
   my @files = grep !/^\.\.?$/, readdir $dh;
   closedir $dh;
   # @files = map{ "$path/".$_ } sort @files; 
   #$_ = decode( 'utf8', $_ ) for ( @files ); 
   @files = map { decode( 'utf8', "$path/".$_  ) } sort @files;
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