I had closer look at why Test/D07multibyte.ztst was being skipped on HP-UX 11.11, I guess it was just too obvious to spot sooner. The locale on the system is en_US.utf8, but that name was being transformed before use. Unfortunately NetBSD's problem isn't the same, so that's still to debug. Either line modified in the following path is sufficient to get the test running, take your pick if you want either or both. Index: Test/D07multibyte.ztst =================================================================== RCS file: /cvsroot/zsh/zsh/Test/D07multibyte.ztst,v retrieving revision 1.29 diff -u -r1.29 D07multibyte.ztst --- Test/D07multibyte.ztst 10 Mar 2009 11:12:03 -0000 1.29 +++ Test/D07multibyte.ztst 26 Apr 2009 17:03:39 -0000 @@ -5,8 +5,8 @@ # Don't let LC_* override our choice of locale. unset -m LC_\* mb_ok= - langs=(en_US.UTF-8 en_GB.UTF-8 en.UTF-8 - $(locale -a 2>/dev/null | sed -e 's/utf8/UTF-8/' | grep UTF-8)) + langs=(en_{US,GB}.{UTF-,utf}8 en.UTF-8 + $(locale -a 2>/dev/null | egrep 'utf8|UTF-8')) for LANG in $langs; do if [[ é = ? ]]; then mb_ok=1