mactime does not run on my RH8 machine w/Perl 5.8.0

Hi all, 
This is my first attempt at using Task (TCT) and I am having a few
problems....as the subj stated, I cant run mactime I get errors
mentioning something about "Malformed UTF-8 character" (sorry cant
provide screen dumps at the moment) I am pretty green at all of this...I
tried recompiling perl, but got similar "Malformed UTF-8 character"
errors. I don't know perl...at all..but after looking around I found
some tidbits mentioning something about "use bytes;" pragma...I am
lost...please help if you can 

TIA