Hiho, following this discussion I learned from mfecteau & Ascend4nt that comspec output can be forced to be in unicode with the /u switch. Reading some docs about the dir command I saw the possibility to re-route the console-output to a pipe... which lead me to this discussion post by ProgAndy (original by Paul Campbell (PaulIA) / PsaltyDS). Just threw it all together and did some minor modifications (wchar). Maybe I'll give it some benchmarking later on, in the meantime I'll just assume it