Alf P. Steinbach wrote, about chcp 65001:
it break a hell of a lot more than batch files. try `more`.
Yes. Life isn't perfect. Incidentally, 'more' demonstrates once again the superiority of UTF-8 (if it worked): C:\Projects\testbed\tmp>dir Volume in drive C has no label. Volume Serial Number is 34C7-A38D Directory of C:\Projects\testbed\tmp 29.10.2011 17:28 <DIR> . 29.10.2011 17:28 <DIR> .. 29.10.2011 17:25 0 Blåbærsyltetøy! 日本国 кошка!.txt 1 File(s) 0 bytes 2 Dir(s) 856,726,167,552 bytes free C:\Projects\testbed\tmp>dir | more Volume in drive C has no label. Volume Serial Number is 34C7-A38D Directory of C:\Projects\testbed\tmp 29.10.2011 17:28 <DIR> . 29.10.2011 17:28 <DIR> .. 29.10.2011 17:25 0 Blåbærsyltetoy! ??? ?????!.txt 1 File(s) 0 bytes 2 Dir(s) 856,726,167,552 bytes free The "dir" command has no problem displaying arbitrary file names directly to the console (presumably via WriteConsoleW), but once it has to write to a file, it needs to convert to narrow and no code page other than 65001 can express the above file name. (My default console code page is 437, which doesn't even have ø. The Consolas font doesn't have glyphs for 日本国, but the characters are present, just not displayable, which is why I could copy and paste them here.) It would've been nice for Microsoft to set all the narrow code pages to UTF-8 in Windows NT (or Windows 64 bit, the other transition point), but they didn't, so here we are.