Shell Programming and Scripting

Scenario: Users drop files into a directory which is regularly polled by my PERL process. On detecting a file my process will move it from the poll dir to a working directory. A user created a file with a £ symbol in the filename and my process now fails.

e.g £££F3AERO££.txt

/sbcimp/run/pd/perl/32-bit/5.8.8/bin

Code:

opendir (POL, $polldir ) 
while( (my $fName = readdir(POL))){
next unless ( $fName =~ /txt$/ );
my ($filename, $Symbol, $bSymbol);
$logger->info("File Name - $fName");
$filename = qq($polldir/$fName);
unless ( -f "$filename" ) {
$logger->logdie("Cannot Stat File"}
}

I can handle most badly formed filenames but the £ has flumoxed me. Any suggestions . Thanks P.S I have messed around with encode/decode utf8 but no luck. The file does exist and I do have permission. Ta.

Maybe PERL is treating it like '#', which is what it is if the 8th bit is lost? You might need some quoting to control it more! Is this file name utf8 or iso8859-1 ? Probably the latter.