schoi@TERI.BIO.UCI.EDU (Sam "Lord Byron" Choi) (01/14/91)
This is a follow up on the problem that I posted a couple days ago about fsck constantly destroying my files. I ran fsck several more times from the Mach shell and got the same results. So after putting the files back on I decided to do an ls -l to see whether there was something strange going on with those particular files. It turned out that I couldn't even get into one of the directories. I tried everything that I could think of. I used the directory name, the directory inside quotes, the directory name inside single quote. I even tried copying the directory name directly from the list after performing an ls to get exactly the same characters in case I was overlooking something. The thing is that the directory name was in French (fran ais). I changed the directory name in the Workspace to just "French" and it worked fine. Then I went back to look at all the files that kept getting deleted by fsck and noticed that all of them had the common denominator of having an unusual character in the file name, whether accent marks for French and German file names or just other symbols. I changed all of the file name to just simple English characters, and the fsck performed fine. I'm guessing that UNIX can't handle as many characters as NeXTStep so when it come to a character that it doesn't recognize it just figures that it's a corrupt file. Is there a fix for this? If NeXTStep can handle the special characters, there shouldn't be any problem just naming my files the way I have been as long as I don't use UNIX. But I would like to have the option of performing an fsck when I think something's screwy without having to lose half of my files. It's interesting that NeXT offers all the keyboard layouts for different countries but didn't modify UNIX enough to handle international users. What about the poor people in France and German who use these characters all the time? Are they running into the same problem? Anyway, I hope this saves some people some grief. Sam schoi@teri.bio.uci.edu