file-name encoding problems

Question

I googled over this topic but couldn't find what I was looking for... the following "happend" to me:

I had my files stored on a NTFS-USB Harddisk, because of space problems I moved them to an ext3 system....somehow the filename (content is still ok as far as I saw) encoding screwed up....my files look like the following now:

Kküken <--- should have an "ü"
Jäger <--- should be an "ä"
Zwölf <--- should be an "ö"
fünfte <-- should be an "ü"
etc ....

These are just examples, but already give me my first question Why has the "ü" two different representations? (Maybe I screw up, before I screw up and now I have a mixing of x different encoding-layers? :) )

I tried the following command:

convmv -r -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-1  *

This command work for some files (for example Zwölf) but not for all:

iso-8859-1 doesn't cover all needed characters for: "fünfte"

So Iguess it must be another encoding - but which? How can I find out this?

And is there any way that I can still fix all of this?

Answer 1

I copy and paste the 4 lines into a text file, then open it in firefox. the Browser auto detect it to be UTF-8 and display following

Kküken <--- should have an "�"
Jäger <--- should be an "�"
Zwölf <--- should be an "�"
fünfte <-- should be an "�"

Your original copy did not "screw up", it pickup NTFS unicode file name correctly. Instead it seems your display/tty/font does not support UTF8/unicode output.

Maybe try to look at your copy in X windows environment.