Non-ascii characters in filenames - bad form?

davidjosepha · 2015-07-01 21:47:47

Pretty simple. Is it considered bad form to use non-ascii characters in the names of directories and files? For example, I listen to quite a bit of Russian music. Is it considered bad in some way to name a directory "Гражданская оборона/" instead of "Grazhdanskaya oborona/". The main thing is that it's a huge pain, because for every song, instead of generating filenames based on the tags (which are in Cyrillic, obviously), I have to manually transliterate them and rename them myself. I also have more trouble recognizing the name of something in the transliterated form since I'm used to seeing it in Cyrillic.

fsckd · 2015-07-01 22:34:15

No. Why would it be?

davidjosepha · 2015-07-01 22:46:01

Could be handled poorly by applications, difficult to type for users other than me, characters might not display properly for people sshing in, to name a few potential reasons. Clearly, I don't consider these problems, but I was wondering if there might be some things I hadn't considered.

fsckd · 2015-07-01 23:20:06

It is a good question. Most applications are unicode aware. If a program chokes because the file name uses a different script, it should be reported as a bug to the developers of that program. And certainly some things might not display correctly. The script of my ancestors is unintelligible in URxvt. A general rule you can follow is to avoid control characters in file names and the leading character should not be whitespace or a blank character. Tab completion should suffice for other users.

kiiroitori · 2015-07-01 23:49:42

fsckd wrote:

No. Why would it be?

Experience told me that you get into troubles with non-ascii characters, I found at my expense that rsync for examples couldn't handle them properly - at least when I tried. I would certainly advise against using them.

karol · 2015-07-01 23:49:48

Tab completion might be tricky if you have no idea how to input even the first few characters, but if you're using some kind of file manager or the filenames are prepended with e.g. numbers, you should be fine.

Blµb · 2015-07-02 15:12:41

With a "real" shell you can just double-tab and navigate to the file with your favorite movement keys ;-)
On the topic: I like to use weird characters to find bad programs; not supporting them is nothing but a bug. If someone's tool chokes on such files then that someone should feel bad and fix it.
Also it's just annoying not to use them.

And apart from unicode characters you can't easily type, many replacements are simply unnecessary. You definitely don't need to turn spaces into underscores or introduce a weird lowercase/uppercase pattern for words.
Just use spaces, damnit. Also, commas, colons, parenthesis, brackets, braces... just USE them damnit.

jsoy9pQbYVNu5nfU · 2015-07-02 15:35:34

kiiroitori wrote:

fsckd wrote:
No. Why would it be?
Experience told me that you get into troubles with non-ascii characters, I found at my expense that rsync for examples couldn't handle them properly - at least when I tried. I would certainly advise against using them.

Sounds like a locale issue to me since I transfer daily file names with CJK characters in their names using rsync (locally and over SSH) and have never had a problem. However this is only *.UTF-8 to *.UTF-8 so what do I know.

Trouble with non-ascii characters in Unicode names for me arises mostly when there's no way to type them using the current keyboard layout (like ♥), though ISO14755 support like in urxvt and input methods via ibus or fcitx plus a Unicode character lookup table like kcharselect or gucharmap fix pretty much everything for me.

The only program I am cautious with regarding non-ascii text is TeX/LaTeX which sometimes require non-obvious tweaks to not choke on such filenames like here.

Last edited by jsoy9pQbYVNu5nfU (2015-07-02 15:36:26)

Arch Linux

#1 2015-07-01 21:47:47

Non-ascii characters in filenames - bad form?

#2 2015-07-01 22:34:15

Re: Non-ascii characters in filenames - bad form?

#3 2015-07-01 22:46:01

Re: Non-ascii characters in filenames - bad form?

#4 2015-07-01 23:20:06

Re: Non-ascii characters in filenames - bad form?

#5 2015-07-01 23:49:42

Re: Non-ascii characters in filenames - bad form?

#6 2015-07-01 23:49:48

Re: Non-ascii characters in filenames - bad form?

#7 2015-07-02 15:12:41

Re: Non-ascii characters in filenames - bad form?

#8 2015-07-02 15:35:34

Re: Non-ascii characters in filenames - bad form?

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