in reply to Re^2: UTF-8 trouble moving from perl 5.8.5 to 5.10.1
in thread UTF-8 trouble moving from perl 5.8.5 to 5.10.1

I guess the question was not why Unicode was broken on the new system, but rather why it worked on the old one.

probably locale related, ie export LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 or some such

or set via perlrun#-C