Re: freebsd and utf-8 directory names

M&S - Krasznai András wrote, On 06/30/2014 08:30:
> There is a partition formatted for FAT32 where I store documents which I would like to view (and edit) both in  windows and freebsd.
>
> The problem is that if the path name contains certain Hungarian characters (e.g o with double accent), then libreoffice in FreeBSD refuses to open them complaining about illegal characters. The directory was created in windows, the document also, and I can handle them perfectly from windows (what is more, libreoffice under a linux can also open those documents). Some accented characters are shown as a question mark in FreeBSD, and some others are as a black rectangle; these latter are causing problems. If a file-nam contains such characters then the file is shown as 0- length in Midnight Commander.

This is not limited to Hungarian characters. There are bugs in FreeBSD's FAT handling code. According to an IRC discussion with "mux", FreeBSD has plenty of VOP_LOOKUP bugs, and this case hits such a bug. To allow FreeBSD to read files with fancy UTF-8 characters in their names, mount the FAT32 partition with ``-o shortnames''. Then, you won't be able to use proper file naming (so this is not even a workaround), but at least you'll be able to read the said files.

Poke the FreeBSD developers to start fixing bugs, maybe (but not very likely) that will help.

Also, you're at least the 3rd user (I'm at least the 2nd) that runs into this case; ie., here's a report: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=14612 (of course, this does not contain a solution).