You don't have to set LANG anymore if you're going to use Perl 5.8.1. From Perl 5.8.1's perldelta:

UTF-8 no longer default under UTF-8 locales

In Perl 5.8.0 many Unicode features were introduced. One of them was found to be of more nuisance than benefit: the automagic (and silent) "UTF-8-ification" of filehandles, including the standard filehandles, if the user's locale settings indicated use of UTF-8.

For example, if you had C<en_US.UTF-8> as your locale, your STDIN and STDOUT were automatically "UTF-8", in other words an implicit binmode(..., ":utf8") was made. This meant that trying to print, say, chr(0xff), ended up printing the bytes 0xc3 0xbf. Hardly what you had in mind unless you were aware of this feature of Perl 5.8.0. The problem is that the vast majority of people weren't: for example in RedHat releases 8 and 9 the B<default> locale setting is UTF-8, so all RedHat users got UTF-8 filehandles, whether they wanted it or not. The pain was intensified by the Unicode implementation of Perl 5.8.0 (still) having nasty bugs, especially related to the use of s/// and tr///. (Bugs that have been fixed in 5.8.1)

Therefore a decision was made to backtrack the feature and change it from implicit silent default to explicit conscious option. The new Perl command line option C<-C> and its counterpart environment variable PERL_UNICODE can now be used to control how Perl and Unicode interact at interfaces like I/O and for example the command line arguments. See L<perlrun> for more information.

Liz