From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225

Description of problem:
Under RedHat 9, when I use Perl to print a character whose ASCII decimal
equivalent is greater than 127, I get two bytes instead of one. This difference
does not appear in Perl distributions that came with RedHat Linux 6.2, 7.2, 7.3.
(I don't have a RH 8.x box to test.)

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
perl-5.8.0-88

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
perl -e 'printf("%c", 169);' | od -ab

Actual Results:
0000000   B   )
        302 251
0000003

Any ASCII decimal between 128 and 255 produces similar results (two bytes
instead of one).

Expected Results:
0000000   )
        251
0000002

Additional info:

The following simple C program produces the expected results on the same platform:

% cat test.c
#include <stdio.h>
main() { printf("%c", 169); }

% cc test.c
% ./a.out | od -ab
0000000   )
        251
0000002
% _