First start with Juerd's perlunitut to get a grasp of handling Unicode in Perl.

You'll also need to make sure your terminal is set to handle UTF-8 characters. You're on a Mac, so I'm guessing you're okay with that. On Windows you'd have to do "chcp 65001" at the command prompt to get proper output.

The following works for me:

use Encode;
print encode_utf8( "£" );
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