diff --git a/charhist/GNUmakefile b/charhist/GNUmakefile
index 574c244..f5db7a3 100644
--- a/charhist/GNUmakefile
+++ b/charhist/GNUmakefile
@@ -3,6 +3,9 @@ include GNUmakerules
 
 all: charhist
 
+charhist: charhist.pl
+	cp $^ $@
+
 chartab:
 clean:
 	rm -f charhist core foo bar baz
diff --git a/charhist/charhist.pl b/charhist/charhist.pl
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8460480
--- /dev/null
+++ b/charhist/charhist.pl
@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
+#!/usr/bin/perl
+use warnings;
+use strict;
+use Getopt::Long;
+use Pod::Usage;
+use autodie;
+
+my $encoding;
+
+GetOptions('encoding=s', \$encoding) or pod2usage();
+
+my %hist;
+if (@ARGV) {
+    readfile($_) for @ARGV;
+} else {
+    readfile();
+}
+
+binmode STDOUT, ":encoding(UTF-8)";
+for (sort keys %hist) {
+    my $cp = ord;
+    printf("%x %d %o %s\t%d\n", $cp, $cp, $cp, /\p{Graph}/ ? $_ : ".", $hist{$_});
+}
+
+sub readfile {
+    my ($filename) = @_;
+    my $fh;
+    if (defined $filename) {
+        open $fh, "<", $filename;
+    } else {
+        $fh = \*STDIN;
+
+    }
+    binmode $fh, ":encoding($encoding)";
+    while (<$fh>) {
+        for my $c (split(//)) {
+            $hist{$c}++;
+        }
+    }
+}