rsync help

[Matthew Flaschen]

Joseph L. Casale wrote:
>> You can look at convmv (http://www.j3e.de/linux/convmv/ (see the man
>> directory for basic documentation).
> 
> I was hoping to not do this, I need an exact copy. Is this a limitation
> involved in the file systems being used (ntfs) or rsync?

One problem is despite NTFS allegedly supporting UTF-16, it actually
imposes no valid/invalid character set.  According to
http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2006/09/10/748699.aspx ,  NTFS
"allows any sequence of unsigned short values which are not limited to
valid Unicode characters".  Thus, the actual encoding of filenames is
not always UTF-16 (it depends on the locale of the system that created
the files), which naturally imposes problems when transferring to and
from other systems (the main reason Unicode was invented).  Even if the
encoding uses only valid UTF-16 characters, that does not mean UTF-16 is
necessarily the /correct/ interpretation of such characters.

Matt Flaschen