I must be making some obvious mistake here, but I'm not seeing it. The file name contains O-umlaut, and the OS handles it fine, but ghci does not like it (although it accepts umlauts in the contents of the file (UTF-8) e.g., as a module name) $ cat fÖÖbar.hs main = print $ product [1..100] $ ghci fÖÖbar.hs GHCi, version 7.4.1: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help Loading package ghc-prim ... linking ... done. Loading package integer-gmp ... linking ... done. Loading package base ... linking ... done. <no location info>: can't find file: f??bar.hs Failed, modules loaded: none. this is on a standard ubuntu install (11.10 and 11.04) with $ locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LANGUAGE= LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" ... $ ghc --version The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System, version 7.4.1 $ uname -a Linux octopus 3.0.0-16-generic #29-Ubuntu SMP Tue Feb 14 12:48:51 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux