Have you seen what replaced the old perl -C option?

-C [number/list]
The -C flag controls some Unicode of the Perl Unicode features.

As of 5.8.1, the -C can be followed either by a number or a list of op
+tion letters. The letters, their numeric values, and effects are as f
+ollows; listing the letters is equal to summing the numbers.

    I     1    STDIN is assumed to be in UTF-8
    O     2    STDOUT will be in UTF-8
    E     4    STDERR will be in UTF-8
    S     7    I + O + E
    i     8    UTF-8 is the default PerlIO layer for input streams
    o    16    UTF-8 is the default PerlIO layer for output streams
    D    24    i + o
    A    32    the @ARGV elements are expected to be strings encoded i
+n UTF-8
    L    64    normally the "IOEioA" are unconditional,
               the L makes them conditional on the locale environment
               variables (the LC_ALL, LC_TYPE, and LANG, in the order
               of decreasing precedence) -- if the variables indicate
               UTF-8, then the selected "IOEioA" are in effect
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