Either save your file with utf8 encoding & BOM or save it with utf8 encoding and a line with "use utf8;" (or "use encoding 'utf8';"). You can also do a manual fix:

# file name: test.pl
# save it with utf8 encoding
use Encode qw(decode_utf8);

binmode STDOUT, ':utf8';

$string1 = "This is greek character 'y': ì";
print "Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8\n\n";
print decode_utf8 $string1;
[download]

You have to set an internal flag on utf8 data. See Encode for more info... Edit: I didn't see you've mentioned your perl version. you must upgrade to 5.8.x as almut said, if want serious unicode support...