There is a difference: packet on a wire is inherently bytes, while interaction with the OS is a can of worms. On UNIX all that are just an opaque byte blobs, bu

There is a difference: packet on a wire is inherently bytes, while interaction with the OS is a can of worms. On UNIX all that are just an opaque byte blobs, but with expectation that these things mean something to humans, so it either are strings in the locale encoding or UTF-8 encoded strings, then there is Windows where this kind of interfaces use something like UTF-16. In general, the name of the thing that you use to interact with the OS probably is a meaningful string of Unicode code points, but it does not have to be so and you should have some kind of plan what to do when it is not. Doing that in a way that abstracts away the conventions of the underlying OS is almost certainly impossible.