I'm just clarifying, not suggesting that your post should be blocked. :)

I'm waiting for the other monks to moderate your post and my suggestion was only to add a "OT" in your title, but now that is clear that this is NOT a Perl problem, I think your title should be changed.

I only think it's important to separate things, so you can get your answer as straight and quick as possible :)

You should search some references about FreeBSD, specially on topics like "codepages", "internationalization" and "keyboard layouts".

Also, on Linux (not sure how this works on BSD) I'd check the environment variables (by typing env on the prompt) of the user that you use to run your code to see if everything's ok there.

Hope that helped,