From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Mon Dec 06 2004 - 14:59:03 CST
John Cowan <jcowan at reutershealth dot com> wrote:
> Windows filesystems do know what encoding they use. But a filename on
> a Unix(oid) file system is a mere sequence of octets, of which only 00
> and 2F are interpreted. (Filenames containing 20, and especially 0A,
> are annoying to handle with standard tools, but not illegal.)
>
> How these octet sequences are translated to characters, if at all,
> is no concern of the file system's. Some higher-level tools, such as
> directory listers and shells, have hardwired assumptions, others have
> changeable assumptions, but all are assumptions.
OK, fair enough. Under a Unixoid file system, a file name consists of a
more or less arbitrary sequence of bytes, essentially unregulated by the
OS.
If interpreted as UTF-8, some of these sequences may be invalid, and the
files may be inaccessible.
This is *exactly* the same scenario as with GB 2312, or Shift-JIS, or KS
C 5601, or ISO 6937, or any other multibyte character encoding ever
devised.
This is not a problem that needs to be solved within Unicode, any more
than it needed to be solved within those other encodings.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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