I think that your problem boils down to three questions:

What is my locale?
Do I need to use binmode?
How do I get the appropriate results?

Knowing when to use binmode can be prove to be a real challenge at times, so I put this script together to answer those questions.

#!/usr/bin/perl -l 

use strict;
use warnings;
use Encode;
use Encode::Locale qw( $ENCODING_LOCALE );
use File::Util qw( needs_binmode );

if ( needs_binmode ne 0 ) {
    print "# ENCODING_LOCALE is $ENCODING_LOCALE";
    print "# Needs binmode";
}
if ( $ENCODING_LOCALE  eq 'UTF-8' ) {
    my $str1 =  "\xC3\xA0";
    my $str2 = "\xD0\xBC";
    print "$str1";
    print "$str2";
}
if( $ENCODING_LOCALE ne 'UTF-8' ) {
    binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(utf8)';
    my $str1 = "\xC3\xA0";
    my $str2 = "\xD0\xBC";
    print "$str1";
    print "$str2";
}
[download]

Encode::Locale and File::Util are required.