Ideally, perl/win32.* will be updated by someone (or by me) to support the Wide functionality.

(Some/All?) the code to support this option is still there from when the -C command line option enabled the use of the wide apis on win32.

# Win32.c:775-782
    /* do the FindFirstFile call */
    if (USING_WIDE()) {
    A2WHELPER(scanname, wbuffer, sizeof(wbuffer));
    fh = FindFirstFileW(PerlDir_mapW(wbuffer), &wFindData);
    }
    else {
    fh = FindFirstFileA(PerlDir_mapA(scanname), &aFindData);
    }

# Win32.c:858-870
        if (USING_WIDE()) {
        res = FindNextFileW(dirp->handle, &wFindData);
        if (res) {
            W2AHELPER(wFindData.cFileName, buffer, sizeof(buffer));
            ptr = buffer;
        }
        }
        else {
        res = FindNextFileA(dirp->handle, &aFindData);
        if (res)
            ptr = aFindData.cFileName;
        }
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All that is needed is the addition of code to enable this at runtime in perl.c/S_parse_body() where it presumably used to live. I can't see any signs of it there now.

Of course, it might be much harder to persuade the powers that be to allocate a new switch letter for the purpose. Maybe additional values could be added to the new interpretation of the -C switch (See perlrun).

Say 'W'/128 for Wide calls. Ie. perl -CW script.pl would do what -C used to do?