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Frank Brenner
Asked: 2011-09-13 01:09:49 +0800 CST

Umlaut encoding: tar on Mac Lion

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I have a tar archive created on an old Unixware machine using ISO8859-1 encoding. When I try to extract it under Macosx Lion, I experience a bit of weirdness with German umlauts. For instance:

I open a terminal.app window with the encoding set to "ISO8859-1" and set my locale like this:

export LANG=de_DE.ISO8859-1
export LC_ALL=de_DE.ISO8859-1

then take a peek at the archive:

dhcp202:Downloads frank$ tar tvf backup.tar home/frank
x home/frank/
x home/frank/Präferenzen/

note that the "ä" is displayed correctly

I then unpack the archive with

tar xvf backup.tar home/frank

the "ä" is also displayed correctly in the output from tar, but when I list the directory contents, I see:

dhcp202:Downloads frank$ ls home/frank
Pr%E4ferenzen

What's up with that?

mac-osx unix tar encoding

1 Answers

  1. Filenames on HFS+ are in UTF-8 format, not in any other encoding (well, except MacRoman for old files). You can see code related to that in the kernel source; for example, in getdirentries_callback() in hfs_catalog.c.

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