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Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2012 13:36:58 -0500
Message-ID: <CAD2Ti29qi_kXRYsvPuv873WSrX=x2Gh6cq28BcwsYd5s-t9eog@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Character set conversion, locales, UTF-8, etc
From: grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail.com>
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Hi. I think I'm looking for a character conversion tool.
I have a few thousand files in a hier. I believe an app, possibly a Java one,
created them while in en_US.US-ASCII mode, or perhaps some other
unidentified locale. Whatever it was, I think it took binary filename data,
interpreted it and wrote the interpretation to disk (instead of the
original binary).
So now any other app that looks at the disk under any locale gets the
names wrong.
So I think I need something to take some stdin from /bin/ls -w (in the
broken way
I have it on disk), let me fiddle with feeding it different locales to
until I see the
right binary representation again, and then emit the binary to stdout
so I can rename
the files back to binary on disk so that any future app can read the names under
it's own local locale.
Does that make sense? I'm very new to character sets and things.

As an aside, why does FreeBSD seem to default to the above locale
instead of say, en_US.UTF-8 ?