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Changing Your Filesystem's Locale?

Posted by Cliff on from the when-your-filenames-need-to-change-charset dept.

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?"

15 comments

  1. Convert what? by Sam+Lowry · · 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.

    1. Re:Convert what? by cyberkreiger · · Score: 3, Informative

      According to "man mount", "iocharset" is an option available to filesystems (v)fat, iso9660, and ntfs only. It's also available for smbfs.

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    2. Re:Convert what? by amorsen · · Score: 4, Informative

      The filesystem thought it was using UTF-8 filenames. That is what the specification says it should use. However the unfortunate poster has used ISO-8859-1 (or -15) file names. Therefore he now has a file system that does not conform to the standard, and of course he wants to do something about it.

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  2. Since when by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Not to be a troll, or to criticise dybdahl for his perfectly understandable question, but since when did slashdot become #linuxhelp?

    1. Re:Since when by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

      I gotta agree. This does not deserve to be on Slashdot, there are much better forums for this question than Slashdot. Heck, following this trend, when can we expect Adam Carolla and Dr Drew to help answer geek love questions?

      "Dr. Drew? This grrl I like is a Gentoohead, and I am a Debian Freak. How can I bring her around to see that Debian is the one true distribution, and to give up her heathen ways?"

  3. Did you look at freshmeat? by cyberkreiger · · Score: 5, Informative

    I think convmv may be what you're looking for.

    --
    Stumbling in the dark
    I hear slavering of jaws
    Eaten by a grue.
  4. during install by Apreche · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've been trying shitloads of distros lately (journal has more info). And despite other problems all of them have asked me what my locale is, what character sets I want to support, and all that kind of stuff. I must say if there is one thing that is more trouble in windows than in *nix it's internationalization. As with everything though, there is a config file somewhere and a package to install.

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  5. Have you tried... by jo42 · · Score: -1, Troll
    > Is there a tool out there that can convert

    Have you tried FORMAT C:?

    1. Re:Have you tried... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      format c:? In Linux? Wouldn't do much, would it?

    2. Re:Have you tried... by Tesseract · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      perhaps you should try rm -rf /mnt/Windows?

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  6. Change the RedHat Default by SpaFF · · Score: 2, Informative

    Ok, so RedHat makes the default charset UTF-8. Just change the default to ISO8859-1. Its like a 2 line change in /etc/sysconfig/i18n. I had to do a similar change when we switched our mailserver to RH8 because early versions of spamassassin (more specifically perl though I think) didn't like playing with UTF-8.

    -Lee

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  7. What they should do by spitzak · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Forget all this nonsense about "locales". It is obvious there are exactly 2 "locales" of interest, UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1. Now suprisingly enough these can co-exist almost perfectly, so there can be *one* "locale" and we can be rid of all this brain-dead attempts at i18n.

    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.

  8. This can also happen by djeca · · Score: 1

    when moving files from a filesystem on the ISO-8859-15 charset to one on the UTF-8 charset - say vfat to ext3.

    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.

  9. Can you believe this !! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0


    Can you believe this -

    http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1 101030519-450997,00.html

  10. Important Question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sometimes when I'm on a road trip I get the urge to take a shit. I'm not talking about your garden variety shit, either. These are the "I've been eating nothing but Taco Bell and Arby's for 3 days" type of shits, where you know that when you finally achieve the glorious release, you're going to be splattering liqui-poo all over the floor tiles of whichever poor establishment has the godawful fate of being conveniently situated at the next exit. My question is, does travel etiquette require that I patronize the establishment (perhaps buying a Coke, or an order of fries) after turning their restroom into a veritable no-man's-land of stench and brownness, or am I free to leave immediately after my fecal Holocaust?