Meanwhile, if I need Unicode output on a Windows console, I put the following near the top of the script:

use Win32::Console;
my $codepage = Win32::Console::OutputCP();
Win32::Console::OutputCP(65000);
binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(cp65000)';
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AFAIK, these settings are per-process, otherwise I'd change this into a BEGIN block with a corresponding END block - that's why I saved the $codepage, you can discard this line if you don't need to restore it within the script.