On Oct 28, 2009, at 2:59, Mogens Kjaer wrote: > If your locale is UTF8, íéèæøå would be multibyte characters. > > If your characters are one byte only, they are not UTF-8. That was the key: the file was not UTF-8. > vim knows how to handle this correctly: Yes, it apparently does. It almost appears to be magic how it figures this out... > If you open the file with vi (you would see the text > [converted] on the bottom line), and do: > > :set fileencoding=utf-8 > > and write out the file again it should be converted so > that cat displays it correctly. Yes, it certainly does. Thanks for the tip. I guess I have a lot to learn about encodings... > You can use the convmv script to convert filenames into > utf-8 (yum install convmv). I will check this out! Thanks, Alfred