Issues removing files with certain characters in their names.

Rich Felker dalias at libc.org
Thu May 29 18:50:03 UTC 2014


On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 09:18:26AM +0200, Harald Becker wrote:
> Hi Denys !
> 
> >> For what it's worth the users with this problem were unable to
> >> remove the files using wildcards. For example, one user had a
> >> file named:
> >>
> >>   På hjul.mkv
> >>
> >> ls P* displayed the file.
> >> rm P* returned the error "can't remove 'På Hjul.mkv': No such
> >> file or directory"
> >
> >I have hard time believing this.
> >Wildcard expansion is done by the shell, not by ls and rm.
> >
> >IOW: ls and rm see exactly the same expanded names.
> >
> >Since they don't mangle the names in any way
> >(e.g. no UTF-8 decoding) before feeding them to system calls,
> >it should work.
> 
> I know this problem very well. It happens about every few month,
> that I get a ZIP packaged file from a Windows system. As the
> maintainer is a bit stupid, he can't manage to avoid foreign
> characters and I end up with unusual file names after unzip.

This sounds like a bug in the unzip utility. If it encounters byte
sequences which are not UTF-8, it should convert them from whatever
legacy encoding they're in to UTF-8, possibly issuing an error that
the user needs to specify this encoding if it can't be determined.

Rich


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