Besides printing duplicate output, a filehandle with an encoding layer with fallback set also usually raises an exception "Close with partial character" when you try to close it. This error message is not documented in either perldiag or PerlIO::encoding, and, in any case, there shouldn't be an error. I attach a test script that tests whether this bug is still present: it tests for both correct output and no exception when you close the file. Ambrus