How can I copy files with special characters in their names with Perl's File::Copy?

Question

I am trying to copy all files in one location to a different location and am using the File::Copy module and copy command from that, but now the issue I am facing is that I have file whose name has special character whose ascii value is &#253 but in unix file system it is stored as ? and so my question is that will copy or move command consider this files with special characters while copying or moving to another location or not, if now then what would be an possible work around for this ?

Note: I cannot create file with special characters in unix because special characters are replaced with ? and I cannot do so in Windows because on Windows Special Characters are replaced with the Encoded value as in my case of &#253 ?

my $folderpath = 'the_path';
open my $IN, '<', 'path/to/infile';
my $total;
while (<$IN>) {
    chomp;
    my $size = -s "$folderpath/$_";
    print "$_ => $size\n";
    $total += $size;
}
print "Total => $total\n";

Courtesy: RickF Answer

Any suggesion would be highly appreciated.

Reference Question : Perl File Handling Question

Answer 1

The following script works as expected for me:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict; use warnings;
use autodie;

use File::Copy qw( copy );
use File::Spec::Functions qw( catfile );

my $fname = chr 0xfd;

open my $out, '>', catfile($ENV{TEMP}, $fname);
close $out;

copy catfile($ENV{TEMP}, $fname) => catfile($ENV{HOME}, $fname);

Answer 2

As workaround I can suggest to convert all unsupported characters to supported. This can be done in many ways. For example you can use URI::Escape:

use URI::Escape;
my $new_file_name = uri_escape($weird_file_name);

Update:

Here is how I was able to copy file by its uft-8 name. I'm on Windows. I've used Win32::GetANSIPathName to get short file name. Then it was copied nice:

use File::Copy;
use URI::Escape;
use Win32;

use utf8; ## tell perl that source code is in utf-9
use strict;
use warnings;

my $test_file = "IBMýSoftware.txt";
my $from_file = Win32::GetANSIPathName($test_file); ## get "short" name of file
my $to_file   = uri_escape($test_file); ## name with special characters escaped

printf("copy [%s] -> [%s]\n", $from_file, $to_file);
copy($from_file, $to_file);

After coping all file to new names on Windows, you'll be able to work with them on linux without problems.

Here are some hints about utf-8 file opening:

• How do I create a Unicode directory on Windows using Perl?
• With a utf8-encoded Perl script, can it open a filename encoded as GB2312?

Answer 3

Character 253 is ý. I guess that on your Unix system the locale is not set, or only the most primitive fall-back locale is in effect, and that is why you see a replacement character. If I am guessing correctly, the solution is to simply set the locale to something, preferably to an UTF-8 locale since that can handle all characters, and Perl shouldn't even enter into the problem.

> cat 3761218.pl
use utf8;
use strict;
use warnings FATAL => 'all';
use autodie qw(:all);

my $file_name = '63551_106640_63551 IBMýSoftware Delivery&Fulfillment(Div-61) Data IPS 08-20-2010 v3.xlsm';
open my $h, '>', $file_name;

> perl 3761218.pl
> ls 6*
63551_106640_63551 IBMýSoftware Delivery&Fulfillment(Div-61) Data IPS 08-20-2010 v3.xlsm
> LANG=C ls 6* # temporarily cripple locale so that the problem in the question is exhibited
63551_106640_63551 IBM??Software Delivery&Fulfillment(Div-61) Data IPS 08-20-2010 v3.xlsm
> locale | head -1 # show which locale I have set
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8