command line applications don't handle accented characters well

[Colin Brace]

Paul Tomblin wrote:

> Before "upgrading" to Fedora Core 3 from RedHat 9,
> termcap/terminfo/ncurses applications handled accented characters
> well.  But now, they're a mish-mash.

Paul, I have seen a raft of such problems, even without using ssh. This 
afternoon, K3b refused to create a temp file for writing to a CD because 
the title had an accent. This week, I copied a lot of MP3s from my old 
OS/2 drive via CDs, and I have had a huge amount of work cleaning up the 
accents in the filenames. In the terminal directory lists, such 
characters showed up as small boxes; when copying on the command line, 
they displayed as \###. In Nautilus, they are question marks with 
"(Invalid Unicode character)" appended to the filename. I have been 
trying to write some simple shell scripts to clean up filenames with 
accents, but I am hampered and frustrated by the inconsistency in the 
way (and/or) my ignorance of how they are handled by the system.

I have only been using Fedora a couple of months, and hence surprised to 
read that accented characters were handled better in an early incarnation.