Heh. Welcome to Unicode :( Unfortunately, many file systems especially in the UNIX world do not precisely specify how file names are to be encoded. Some of them treat file names as opaque null terminated byte arrays.
Thus this may not be a bug in Java so much as a design problem/oversight with the operating systems themselves. Note that the issue you're running in to is *not* to do with encodings. It's not a UTF-8 vs UTF-16 type issue. Rather, the issue is that Unicode allows visually identical strings to be represented differently at the logical layer, using different sequences of code points. You didn't say what app originally saved the files. However, what exact sequence of code points you get on disk for a given piece of human readable text can depend on things as varying as what input method editor the user typed the file name with, precisely what combination of keys they pressed and when, what libraries the app used, and so on. Yes it's a mess. If you encounter such situations frequently then your best bet may be to simply write a little wrapper that tries different normalisations until it finds one that works.
