> Consider that on Linux a filename is just an arbitrary sequence of bytes with some limitations, and on Windows it's an arbitrary sequence of 16-bit integers.

> Consider that on Linux a filename is just an arbitrary sequence of bytes with some limitations, and on Windows it's an arbitrary sequence of 16-bit integers. You can put unpaired surrogate characters in a Windows path, and you can put 0xff in a Linux path. I don't think these are as equivalent as you imply. While it's technically possible for Windows paths to contain unpaired surrogates, in practice it never happens outside of malicious software (and even that's rare), Whereas on Linux, getting a "random" bag of bytes is relatively common because the convention of UTF-8 is new (and is a userspace convention). Of course it's usually not truly random but you have to play guess the encoding if you want to interpret it.