Hi, supposed that, in a Linux system, in an utf-8 locale, you create a file with non ascii characters. For instance: touch abèèè Now, I would expect that the output of a shell command such as "ls ab*" would be a string/list of 5 chars. Instead I find it to be a list of 8 chars...;-) That is to say, each non ascii character is read as 2 characters, as if the string were an ISO-8859-1 string - the string is actually treated as an ISO-8859-1 string. But when I print it, now it is displayed correctly. I don't understand what's wrong and, this is worse, I don't understand what I should be studying to understand what I'm doing wrong. After reading about character encoding, the way the linux kernel manages file names, I would expect that a file name set in an utf-8 locale should be read by locale aware application as an utf-8 string, and each character a unicode code point which can be represented by a Haskell char. What's wrong with that? Thanks for your kind attention. Andrea Here the code to test my problem. Before creating the file remember to set the LANG environmental variable. Something like: export LANG="en_US.utf8" should be fine. (Check your available locales with "locale -a") import System.Process import System.IO import Control.Monad main = do l <- fmap lines $ runProcessWithInput "/bin/bash" [] "ls ab*" putStrLn (show l) mapM_ putStrLn l mapM_ (putStrLn . show . length) l runProcessWithInput cmd args input = do (pin, pout, perr, ph) <- runInteractiveProcess cmd args Nothing Nothing hPutStr pin input hClose pin output <- hGetContents pout when (output==output) $ return () hClose pout hClose perr waitForProcess ph return output