[kahirsch]

What would you expect the output to be when the input is:

    nôn
    nôn

Sending that through rev (with a UTF-8 locale), I get

    n̂on
    nôn

By the way, did you know the perl -l flag removes newlines on input and adds them for a print, so your command could just be:

  perl -lne 'print scalar reverse'

And, for a unicode-aware version:

  perl -CDS -lne 'print scalar reverse'