This smells like that locale problem everybody's been talking about, and the giveaway is "Malformed UTF-8 character".

• redhat 8 "Malformed UTF-8 character"
• Problems with Date::Manip in RedHat 8.0 Perl 5.8.0
• legacy code, utf8 and Perl 5.8.0
• Malformed UTF-8 characters in Regular Expressions
• pattern match hangs on malformed UTF-8 input
• Perl5.8.0/RH8/Date::Manip/UTF8 Problem

MJD says "you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!"

I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6.x and 5.8.x -- I take requests (README).

** The third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.