[CentOS] Locales and filenames

Tue Oct 27 13:45:09 UTC 2009
Niki Kovacs <contact at kikinovak.net>

Alfred von Campe a écrit :
> I have a file which contains non-ASCII characters (umlauts, accented  
> characters, etc.) both in its filename as well as its content.  The  
> only way I have been able to see these characters is inside vim,  
> where they are displayed correctly no matter what I have LANG set  
> to.  My default LANG is en_US.utf8, but I have tried de_DE.utf8,  
> de_DE.iso88591, and various others.  In the output of a simple ls,  
> the characters are shown as either a simple "?" or a "?" in a box  
> depending on what I have LANG set to, and the same is true if I use  
> cat to display the contents.  I have tried this both in an xterm as  
> well as a gnome-terminal window on a CentOS 5.3 system.
> 
> I am taking stabs in the dark here as I've never had to deal with  
> LANG and locales before.  

The 'file' command displays encoding information. If you have to change 
the encoding, use 'recode'. Example :

$ recode latin1..utf8 file

... from latin 1 (iso-8859-1 or the likes) to UTF-8.

$ recode utf8..latin1 file

... the other way around.

Check the syntax with the two dots between encodings.

Cheers,

Niki