Changing Your Filesystem's Locale? 15
dybdahl asks: "Now that Red Hat has changed the default character set to be UTF-8, none of the existing filenames that included local characters like æ, ø, å, (Denmark) are handled correctly by Konqueror or can be seen correctly with "ls" in a shell. Is there a tool out there that can convert an ISO8859-1 ext3 filesystem to UTF-8?"
Convert what? (Score:3, Informative)
The filesystem has been stocking the filenames in utf-8 for ages. What you have to do is to make sure there is iocharset=utf-8 in the options of mount in the file /etc/fstab.
In general, man mount helps a lot.
Re:Convert what? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Convert what? (Score:5, Informative)
This can also happen (Score:1)
I know.
Luckily there were only about 12 files (courtesy of a recent trip to Sweden) and mv-ing them wasn't too tricky.
Any more and I would have got seriously frustrated, and probably ended up writing convmv myself.
Did you look at freshmeat? (Score:5, Informative)
during install (Score:3, Interesting)
Change the RedHat Default (Score:3, Informative)
-Lee
What they should do (Score:3, Insightful)
What systems should do is treat all streams of bytes as UTF-8, with the additional rule that all sequences of bytes that are not legal UTF-8 (including a unicode value encoded with more bytes than necessary) should be treated as individual bytes in ISO-8859-1. It turns out that you need three accented characters in a row, or a capitalized accent character followed by a foreign punctuation mark, for an ISO-8859-1 to be confused with UTF-8.
I very much believe this works, although I think a search should be done through lots of ISO-8859-1 text to find out if there are any common sequences that are confused with UTF-8.
Even if this is not a perfect solution, it certainly is better than the current scheme. Most filenames will be readable. More importantly it gets rid of the idea of an "error" in a character string, significantly simplifying the interfaces.