[NCLUG] charset/encoding challenges & filesystems

Luke Jones slukejones at gmail.com
Sun Nov 25 20:50:53 MST 2012


I'm moving a metric boatload of data from my MacBook to my Linux box, and
I'm trying to decide what to do about file encodings. Briefly, filenames on
the Mac like

Blue Öyster Cult/Agents of Fortune/03 (Don't Fear) The Reaper.mp3

look the same on Linux (...ue Öyster ...) but the encoding appears to be
different, since rsync keeps trying to fix it.

Now rsync has an --iconv=CHARSET option I never noticed before, so maybe I
could use that.

Alternatively, I see that ext4 will accept as filenames pretty much any
sequence of bytes I throw at it. So maybe I just need to make sure all my
user interfaces (Gnome, the Terminal, etc.) all have the right locale
specified.

So before I plunge into the master's thesis assignment that is sorting this
all out, let me ask if anyone's done this before and can they recommend
settings:

1) do you tell rsync to use iconv?
2) do you set mount options for your ext4 filesystems?
3) do you say screw it all and downmode to 7bit ASCII?

Help!




-- 
Luke Jones  slukejones at gmail.com



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