A file system doesn’t fix the problem either because there are regularly problems at file system boundaries. For example, moving from a case-sensitive file sys

A file system doesn’t fix the problem either because there are regularly problems at file system boundaries. For example, moving from a case-sensitive file system to a case-insensitive file system, you will eventually find two distinct bags of bytes that something thinks are the same; if the original disk contains files with both names, you have to pick one or error out. Even if you know the first file system is UTF-8 and the 2nd is ISO-8859-1, the case difference can still be there. It seems to me that the only correct solution is to error out when there are at least two viable versions of a file. Even if you’re trying to “sort and display file names”, you would need to acknowledge at that point that the exact file name isn’t clear. And once your program is doing that, it doesn’t really matter why the two versions are different: maybe it’s a Unicode problem, maybe it’s not.