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Re: Bidi terminal emulation considered harmful (fwd)
On Thu, 2001-11-29 at 21:43, Herouth Maoz wrote:
> > I wonder what others think about the adoption of basic Unix tools to
> > work with BiDi. The opinion of the author of the fwd message is
> > expressed at the last paragraph.
The problem here is with the ambigous encoding of filenames in file
systems. For example, ext2fs doesn't care what encoding the filename is
in - the interpretation of the filename byte stream is up to you. You
could interpret the same byte stream in ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-8-I and
get different glyphs -- and nothing hints you of the correct encoding.
OTOH, Windows' vfat and ntfs store filenames internally in Unicode.
In the case of vfat, the Linux kernel offers an option to convert the
filenames to your local encoding or to return them in utf8 format. In
any case, it's not known what encoding the filenames is intended to be
in.
Do any other Unixes kernels offer calls to list directories and open
files while referring to them by their Unicode names? Something like A
and W versions of functions on WinNT?
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