Apologies to you both, and to everyone else - I know better than to have posted such a question w/o some "clues" to work with. I'm afraid I've been up too many hours, and need some rest.

In answer to your question - or rather, to place what I should have already;

sys UNIX
# locale
LANG=
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_ALL=

Once again, sorry for the omissions, and thank you for all your time and consideration.

P.S. Just a "hunch"; do I need to set a perl env in the script to make perl happy, maybe?
--
Advance perl usage;
Do something really cool with it, and then share it with everyone.

That can be done but isn't required , see perllocale for all the details.

Also, according to this, its a operating system problem, so you might check for updates for yours.