By "at your console" I assume you mean "in a cmd.exe window." Right after a reboot, chcp reports the active console code page as 437. Later on, some undetermined process changes it. After that, chcp reports the code page as 1252. My script does set STDOUT to UTF8 with binmode and the output, redirected to a file, is correct. I tried setting STDIN to UTF8, but this seems to have no effect on the behavior of qx.