argathin has it right -- it's Red Hat's use of utf-8 by default. As you've noted, 'use bytes' fixes this within your script.

Another way around it is to unset the LANG environment variable (but for your script, you'd have to reinvoke with the new ENV setting). This is in case you're relying on external programs, such as the sort command, which sometimes break under the utf-8 setting.

Cheers,
Matt

P.S. By 'reinvoke', I mean something along the lines of this (ugly): 

  #!/usr/bin/perl

  delete $ENV{LANG};
  exec($0, @ARGV);

[download]

In reply to Re: Split loop error with perl 5.8 by mojotoad
in thread Split loop error with perl 5.8 by Lars Povlsen

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.