On Oct 27, 2009, at 9:45, Niki Kovacs wrote: > The 'file' command displays encoding information. If you have to > change > the encoding, use 'recode'. Example : Thanks for the quick response, Niki, but I don't need to change the encoding (at least I don't think I do). I just want ls to show me the non-ASCII characters in its output and cat to display the characters properly in my xterm or gnome-terminal. Currently, both of these commands display them as "?". My current test case has a file which contains a "ç" (0xE7, c with cedilla) in its filename, and an "í" (0xED, i acute) inside the file. Alfred