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Problems with UTF characters when mounting file systems

Posted Tuesday, January 13th 2015 in FreeBSD - Permalink

A couple of times, I have been burnt when mounting file systems in FreeBSD that hold some filenames that contain UTF characters. Notably, when mounting a FAT32 USB stick. Usually, I mount one using a command such as

% mount -t msdosfs /dev/da4s1 ./mount
% ls mount
weird?-character?s

If the files contain characters that cannot be read by the terminal, you will need to mount the filesystem using a different locale, for example

% mount_msdosfs -L en_US.UTF-8 /dev/da4s1 ./mount
% ls mount
weird���-character���s

Shell tab-completion should now work on these files.