Fix funky Samba filenames

Dan — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 02:21:43 +0000

While I was ssh’ed into my file server, I noticed that the files on my Samba shares were messed up — for example, “Béla Fleck and the Flecktones” would appear as “BÃ©la Fleck and the Flecktones” — though everything was OK when looking at the shares as a client. After spending a lot of time messing around with code pages and character sets in my smb.conf, e.g.

[global]
   dos charset = CP850
   unix charset = iso8859-1
   display charset = LOCALE

I finally ran across an old mailing list posting that told me the secret: set my terminal to UTF-8 (to match the default character set of my Ubuntu server). Duh. I went into my PuTTY settings (yes, I was in Windows) and changed it from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8. Muuuch better. Forget that smb.conf stuff.

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Fix funky Samba filenames