Here is a very interesting little problem. ghci GHCi, version 6.12.1: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help Loading package ghc-prim ... linking ... done. Loading package integer-gmp ... linking ... done. Loading package base ... linking ... done. Prelude> :m System.Process Prelude System.Process> runCommand "echo привет" ?@825B This is a minimal test case for a bug reported in HSH at http://github.com/jgoerzen/hsh/issues#issue/1 It is not entirely clear to me what the behavior here should be. It seems inconsistent with the default behavior of System.IO to, apparently, just strip the bits higher than 0xFF. On the other hand, when it's OS commands we're talking about, it's not entirely clear to me if the default should be to encode in UTF-8. There should almost certainly be an *option* controlling this, and perhaps a version of runProcess that accepts ByteStrings. Thoughts? -- John