Thanks for your suggestions to my question (this node was entered by me, I made a registration, but found later that my question was registered as coming from anonymous). However, though the documentation suggests that from 5.8.7 onward (and my z/OS-USS perl version is 5.8.7) UTF-8 would be truly UTF-8 whereas utf8 might be platform dependent, it simply doesn't work. I tried different constructions using 'UTF-8' and even 'UTF-8-strict', with and without PerlIO. I keep ending up with UTF-EBCDIC output. I think I'll just have to write my own conversion function for this.