Red Hat 8 and 9 both use "en_us.UTF-8 " encoding as the default system format. I have found this causes problems with many things. For example, when I ssh into RH8/9, many characters do not display properly on the man pages. I do not know that this causes problem with PERL exactly, but as I was googling I read that the malformed UTF-8 character message had something to do with LANG settings. Putting two together makes me wonder is you should try changing the LANG setting to "en_us" I made the change to /etc/sysconfig/i18n The default file reads LANG="en_US.UTF-8" SUPPORTED="en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en" SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16" I change my file to read LANG="en_US" SUPPORTED="en_US" SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16" Doing so fixed all my problems. It may do the same for the PERL messages. Worth a shot anyway - especially since it is easy to change/restore if necessary (I have not found that changing it causes any problems)