But the things you print to STDOUT aren't text strings, they are byte strings. The ü in your byte string is not one code point with value 195, but instead is (as hex) c3 bc. Now :utf8 converts the codepoints 0xc3 and 0xbc to UTF-8 and prints that. Not what you want.

You should take care to either only use byte strings or only text strings. I wrote an article that explains that plus lots of background (there's also a German version if you happen to like that better - considering that you're using Umlauts as examples)

If you want more documentation, read the perluniintro and perlunicode manual pages.

String arguments passed to system calls are treated as binary strings. That is, if you provide a string to a system call, perl will actually pass its internal representation of the string, and that may not be what you want.

For instance, this similarly looking code will probably not perform as expected:

my $file = "men".chr(0xdc);
open(FIND, "find ... -name $file|");
[download]

use Encode;
my $file = ...;
open(FIND, "find ... -name ".encode("utf-8", $file)."|");
[download]

Whether or not "utf-8" is correct in this case depends on your OS, how you are using your file system and how find is going to interpret the argument.

Using binmode on FIND would address the first problem, and using the appropriate encoding on STDOUT would address the second.

if this is a typical reasonably new Linux distro, it's UTF-8 by default, i.e., you are right. He should have done

open FIND, '-|:encoding(utf8)', 'find /dev/sda2 -name menü'
[download]

find is simply producing whatever was put there. In Linux, file names are just byte strings which may be interpreted however the user wants. Thus, it is incumbent on the user to decide on a convention for encoding file names and then to stick to that convention.

This demonstrates what's going on:

#!/usr/bin/perl

system("/bin/rm abc*");
system("/bin/ls"); # no files begin with "abc"

my $name = "abc".chr(128);
open(FOO, ">", $name); close(FOO);

my $name2 = $name.chr(256);
chop $name2;

if ($name eq $name2) {
  print "\$name and \$name2 are ",
        ($name ne $name2 ? "not " : ""), "equal as perl strings\n";
}

open(BAR, ">", $name2); close(BAR);
system("/bin/ls"); # shows two files beginning with "abc"
[download]

perl is evidently passing its internal representation of $name and $name2 to the operating system's open() routine, and the OS is simply using that sequence of bytes as the file name.

Your own Unicode Advice is a little more strenuous about not using _utf8_on and _utf8_off, which is what :utf8 boils down to.

That wiki is unreadable without javascript