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