@Daniel: If that workaround makes a difference, it sounds like the cause of the problem is that LANG was set to a non-UTF-8 value (such as C or POSIX). So it would be an encoding issue. Can you confirm that?
@Daniel: If that workaround makes a difference, it sounds like the cause of the problem is that LANG was set to a non-UTF-8 value (such as C or POSIX). So it would be an encoding issue. Can you confirm that?