[texdoc] Weird behavior of `texdoc'

[Karl Berry]

    P.S. comand should be command, I guess ;-)

Indeed. Thanks, will fix.

    Strangely, manually running `less "/usr/local/œôó¦` displays the
    characters correctly.

Yes, that is strange. texdoc is calling the Lua function os.execute().
Maybe it clears the environment, including the locale?
But that wouldn't explain why it is only failing on your system.

Grepping for locale in texmf-dist/scripts/texdoc, I see a function
setup_config_from_locale in the file config.tlu.  Maybe you could try
commenting the call to that function at line 501 (put the string "--" at
the beginning of the line, or just delete it) and see if that makes a
difference.  I have no specific idea of why it would be the problem, but
it's what I see ... --best, karl.