Basically the end result is the same whether I do a 'cat salam.txt' locally or 'type salam.txt' on the VMS host. The correct letters display, they're just not joined together like they should be. It's a bug in Terminal, it doesn't handle ligatures for Arabic (which are rather trick, but then again they are built into OS X, so it's odd).. And I think Johnny's right, they are UTF-8 encoded, here's what the text looks like in binary: 00000000 D8 B3 D9 84 D9 85 20 D8 B9 D9 84 D9 8A D9 83 D9 85 ...... ..........