I don't think it is a local thingie...

I believe it to be a problem with the represntation of that character, as in, in a dos-prompt it is displayed differently then in windows.

Here is something you can try: edit a file in dos, type the charachter, and open that file in windows (after saving it ofc)...

Or another possibility, run: perl -wle "printf qq(%02X\n), ord(qq(ü));"

This code should return a hex-charachter, which you can use in your code like: \xFC (that code returns FC on my system, but it might be different on yours...)

Update: doing what I suggested, (creating the file in DOS and opening it in windows), returns the value 81... so try with \xFC or \x81.

Another thing you might want to do is use Net::Ping instead of the ping command... (not sure if it works though since I haven't used it before)