Issue #956 has been updated by Tom Link. It seems that the locale recognition doesn't work 100% or maybe I'm just doing it wrong. On cygwin, the default external encoding is cp850. If I set LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, then rube -e "Encoding.default_external" => UTF-8 gives the correct value. But if I set it to LANG=de_DE.ISO-8859-1, then rube -e "Encoding.default_external" => CP850 returns the windows default locale. Since CP850 und ISO-8859-1 are incompatible encodings in the ruby mind-set, this is an unpleasant discovery. ---------------------------------------- http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/956 ---------------------------------------- http://redmine.ruby-lang.org