I wondered about the same thing a while ago, and was given the following "magic incantation" for defaulting to UTF-8 for both opening files and the STD* filehandles: 

use open IO => ':utf8', ':std';

[download]

That said, there are reasons why Unicode isn't the default; see e.g. why no default unicode?. tchrist's insights on Unicode (already mentioned above) are also worth reading.

In reply to Re: Permanent utf8 by AppleFritter
in thread Permanent utf8 by pcouderc

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