Interesting proposal. It's interesting that such filenames cause a lot of problems for GUI toolkits as well. For example, Qt since Qt 4 removed the hacks they

Interesting proposal. It's interesting that such filenames cause a lot of problems for GUI toolkits as well. For example, Qt since Qt 4 removed the hacks they had in QString to allow malformed Unicode data in its QString constructor. What this means is that the old trick of just reading a filename from the OS and making a QString out of it is impossible in general since there are filenames which are not valid ASCII, Latin-1, or UTF-8. Qt does provide a way to convert from the "local 8-bit' filename-encoding to and from QString, but this depends on there being one, and only one, defined filename-encoding (unless the application wishes to roll its own conversion). This has effectively caused KDE to mandate users use UTF-8 for filenames if they want them to show up in the file manager, be able to be passed around on DBus interfaces, etc. Frankly I can't wait until we can safely rely on filenames being UTF-8 and UTF-8 only. Better still if that can be enforced by the kernel somehow.