UTF-8 and filenames

[Simo Sorce]

Replying to myself :(

On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 18:51 -0400, Simo Sorce wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 17:44 -0500, Callum Lerwick wrote:
> > Okay, so people missed my point.
> > 
> > The point is, if its a tool that doesn't *have* to care about encodings,
> > then it should not care about encodings. If its not something that
> > performs stuff like alphabetical sorting or case insensitive comparison,
> > then it should just accept and pass on the filename as a bag of bits,
> > not caring what they mean.
> > 
> > For example, for a long time rsync wouldn't allow you to specify files
> > and directories with spaces in the name on the command line, no matter
> > how hard you tried to escape or quote it. It would interpret the space
> > as a filename seperator. This finally got fixed at some point though. :)

Except that rsync may run on windows or mac OS X as well, and this
reintroduce the need for rsync to be able to understand what are the
bits so that it can translate names to UTF-16 ...

> > This also applies to people not properly quoting variables in shell
> > scripts... :(
> 
> This is much more clearer and I agree 101%

I still agree, it is just that the number of apps that can really avoid
caring are less than what most people may think without careful
consideration.

Simo.