[CentOS] Locales and filenames

Wed Oct 28 13:10:15 UTC 2009
Alfred von Campe <alfred at von-campe.com>

On Oct 27, 2009, at 19:28, ken wrote:

> E.g., create a file with vi with just one German/Greek/French word,  
> say,
> Έντελέχεια (Entylecheia, an ancient Greek word).  If the  
> name of the
> file is "nonenglish", then, after you do your save in vim, run the  
> shell
> commands
>
> touch temp; mv temp $(cat nonenglish)

I guess my issue is how these characters get generated in the first  
place.  By cutting and pasting the word "Έντελέχεια" from  
your email into a file on Linux (via the Synergy mouse & keyboard  
sharing utility no less), I was able to create a file containing that  
word and also named that word and display it correctly with cat and  
ls.  So UTF-8 encoding appears to work just fine.  It's 8-byte  
characters in ISO 8859-1 encoding that are causing my problem.   
Fortunately, I think I don't have to deal with ISO 8859-1 encodings,  
and my problem was self-created by cutting and pasting characters  
from the iso_8859-1 man page.

Now I have a follow up question: so far I've only been able to enter  
non-ASCII characters on my Linux system by cutting & pasting; how do  
I actually generate any of these characters on a system with a US  
keyboard?

Thanks for all that have helped me solve this problem.

Alfred