Using some fairly recent O/S's, such as Fedora core 8 and WIndows XP, I seem to have no way to move a bunch of files from one to the other while preserving the nice unicode filenames I have.
In specific, the files were created on the fc8 system. (a few thousand of them) Putting them together in a zip file works fine fc8->fc8, but fails miserably when trying to unzip in windows. A bit of searching shows this: http://www.pkware.com/documents/casestudies/APPNOTE.TXT pkware has apparently declared a flag bit to mean all filenames are utf-8 But at the same time, the developers of info-zip say this: http://www.info-zip.org/FAQ.html Basically, that utf-8 support is nowhere on their radar. Things work poorly in the opposite direction for zipfiles created on windows as well: sometimes i can guess the original encoding and reverse the damage, other times I cannot : perhaps the software that made the archive has already trashed the filenames. Ive also given tarballs a shot for this task, but sadly cygwin is ascii-only. Because it works linux to linux, or at least fedora to fedora, and that is really good enough for me, Its not a major issue. But I'm curious to know if other have run into this cross-platform problem, and how they resolved it for themselves. That is, if anyone still reads this list. How do you go about making a basic archive containing non-ascii filenames that you can have confidence will unpack well on most operating systems.
