> Except that the geniuses who maintain the extant Unix systems still couldn't bring themselves to at least start transitioning pathnames to utf8, [...] As far

> Except that the geniuses who maintain the extant Unix systems still couldn't bring themselves to at least start transitioning pathnames to utf8, [...] As far as POSIX and Unix `open(2)` and friends go, pathnames are opaque binary with only two special byte values: NUL (0x00, because it's C strings, which are NUL-terminated) and '/' (because that's the path component separator). Any codeset and form that is compatible with that will "work" -- for some value of "work" where if the codeset isn't Unicode in UTF-8 then you'll be sad. Nothing keeps users / sites from declaring that thou shall use UTF-8 on the filesystem, or, even better, that thou shall use UTF-8 locales only, as the latter is the only simple way to [mostly] get the former. > At least ZFS (which also incidentally is pretty much the only non-terrible filesystem) has an utf8only flag. Note that ZFS can't tell if the strings from user-land are in UTF-8. ZFS can only tell if they're not valid UTF-8.