Now Perl-5.8.1-to-be has been changed to (1) not to do any implicit UTF-8-ification of any filehandles unless explicitly asked to do so (either by the -C command line switch or by setting the env var PERL_UTF8_LOCALE to a true value, the switch wins if both are present) (and if the locale settings do not indicate a UTF-8 locale, both are silent no-ops)
(2) illegal UTF-8 causing a -w(arning) immediately when read in e.g. by <> (an immediate croak is a possibility, but a warning is how it now works, and a croak would be, err, even more non-traditional for UNIX...) Note that the above do not change the fact that if a *programmer* wants their code to be UTF-8 aware, they need to think about the evil binmode(). -- Jarkko Hietaniemi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.iki.fi/jhi/ "There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is 'dead'." -- Jack Cohen