Garbage characters on directory and/or file name

On my Seagate Dockstar running on debian ARMel, ls -al returns all Chinese characters of a directory and/or file name as ?????? (see below)

[root@debian:/root 3%] # ls -la /srv/
total 12
drwxr-xr-x  3 root   root    4096 Mar 15 22:34 .
drwxr-xr-x 21 root   root    4096 Feb 16  2015 ..
drwxr-xr-x  2 nobody nogroup 4096 Mar 16 13:05 ????????????
[root@debian:/root 4%] # ls -la /srv/\347\273\247\347\210\266\345\233\236\345\256\266/
total 876960
drwxr-xr-x 2 nobody nogroup      4096 Mar 16 13:05 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root   root         4096 Mar 15 22:34 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nogroup 178467784 Feb 15 19:15 ?????????.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nogroup 180803541 Feb 15 21:18 ?????????.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nogroup 182210980 Mar 15 22:32 ?????????.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nogroup 177843368 Feb 15 22:20 ?????????.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nogroup 178652002 Feb 16 11:56 ?????????.mp4
[root@debian:/root 5%] #

OTOH, this does not happen when I tried the same thing on my OpenSuSE Linux desktop computer (see below). Is there a package I must install to remedy this issue?

[habibie@linux:/mnt/exports/devel/openwrt-git-trunk 276%] ~ ls -la /mnt/
total 12
drwxr-xr-x  3 root   root    4096 Mar 15 22:34 .
drwxr-xr-x 23 root   root    4096 Sep  9  2017 ..
drwxr-xr-x  2 nobody nogroup 4096 Mar 16 13:05 继父回家
[habibie@linux:/mnt/exports/devel/openwrt-git-trunk 277%] ~ ls -la /mnt/继父回家/
total 876960
drwxr-xr-x 2 nobody nogroup      4096 Mar 16 13:05 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root   root         4096 Mar 15 22:34 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nogroup 178467784 Feb 15 19:15 第一集.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nogroup 180803541 Feb 15 21:18 第三集.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nogroup 182210980 Mar 15 22:32 第二集.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nogroup 177843368 Feb 15 22:20 第五集.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nogroup 178652002 Feb 16 11:56 第四集.mp4
[habibie@linux:/mnt/exports/devel/openwrt-git-trunk 278%] ~

It could a setting in the terminal program your using to access your Dockstar. I use PuTTY with the Window Translation set to UTF-8 and I can view file names with Chinese characters properly on my Dockstar. I don't believe I've ever installed anything extra.

-JT

Yes, there is some minimum UTF-8 setup needed. I will post my settings (in my log somewhere).

-bodhi
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How to enable UTF-8 for different languages in your system.

=============================================

Please adjust the locale to your own country. This example uses US UTF-8.

Prerequisite:

locales was already installed with:

apt-get install locales

Steps:

1. Change locale.gen (uncomment the appropriate line).

cat locale.gen

# This file lists locales that you wish to have built. You can find a list
# of valid supported locales at /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED, and you can add
# user defined locales to /usr/local/share/i18n/SUPPORTED. If you change
# this file, you need to rerun locale-gen.

<snip>

en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

2. Run locale-gen to generate locale

locale-gen

Output:

Generating locales (this might take a while)...
  en_US.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.

3. Create UTF-8 Language export in your root login and user accounts

echo "export LANG=en_US.UTF-8" > ~/.utf8

4. Include the UTF-8 export in your root or other users .profile

cat ~/.profile

# ~/.profile: executed by Bourne-compatible login shells.

<snip>

. ~/.utf8

5. Install unicode

apt-get install xfonts-efont-unicode
apt-get install xfonts-efont-unicode-ib

6. Reboot. Upon the system is up, Samba should present to the display on your other machine directory explorer, finder, ... utf-8 compliance file names.

-bodhi
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Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 03/19/2018 01:22AM by bodhi.

renojim Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> It could a setting in the terminal program your using to access your Dockstar. I use PuTTY with the Window Translation set to UTF-8 and I can view file names with Chinese characters properly on my Dockstar. I don't believe I've ever installed anything extra.
>
> -JT
>
My OpenSUSE Linux Desktop computer correctly displays the Chinese characters. However, when I connect to my Seagate Dockstar through an SSH login from the same OpenSUSE Linux Desktop computer, the directory listing shows ????? characters as a filename. Using the same OpenSUSE Linux Desktop computer to connect to another OpenSUSE Linux Desktop computer through an SSH login, I have no problem to list some directories in Chinese characters. As such, I don't think this has anything to do with an SSH session, but rather I suspect it has something to do with the settings and/or missing packages on my Seagate Dockstar.

Bodhi,

I ran into these problems:

1. I really don't know where to find the locale.gen file.
2. There was no such locale-gen utility and I had to install the locales package (apt-get install locales) to get the locale-gen utility.
3. After installing the locales package, I executed locale-gen and it does not produce the ~/.utf8 file as you pointed out above.

[root@debian:/root 28%] # locale-gen
Generating locales (this might take a while)...
Generation complete.
[root@debian:/root 29%] # ls -la
total 40
drwx------  5 root root 4096 Mar 17 08:47 .
drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 4096 Feb 16  2015 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  570 Jan 31  2010 .bashrc
drwx------  3 root root 4096 Jun 14  2013 .config
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 Jul 23  2017 .nano
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  481 Jul 20  2017 .profile
drwx------  2 root root 4096 Jul 23  2017 .ssh
-rw-------  1 root root 9484 Mar 17 08:47 .viminfo
[root@debian:/root 30%] #

Anyway, when I installed the psmisc package, apt-get spits out some warnings w.r.t locales (see below).

[root@debian:/root 26%] # apt-get install psmisc
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  psmisc
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 174 not upgraded.
Need to get 113 kB of archives.
After this operation, 532 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian buster/main armel psmisc armel 23.1-1 [113 kB]
Fetched 113 kB in 0s (123 kB/s)
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
        LANGUAGE = (unset),
        LC_ALL = (unset),
        LC_TIME = "en_US.UTF-8",
        LC_MONETARY = "en_US.UTF-8",
        LC_COLLATE = "en_US.UTF-8",
        LC_MEASUREMENT = "en_US.UTF-8",
        LC_NUMERIC = "en_US.UTF-8",
        LANG = "C"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
Selecting previously unselected package psmisc.
(Reading database ... 21696 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../psmisc_23.1-1_armel.deb ...
Unpacking psmisc (23.1-1) ...
Setting up psmisc (23.1-1) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.6.1-2) ...
10.844u+1.908s=0:34.70e(36.7%) TDSavg=0k+0k+0k max=81664k 160584+80184io 121pf+0sw
[root@debian:/root 27%] #

Bodhi,

After some googling around, I found this article (even though the author did not seem to completely resolve his/her issue) and managed to resolve the issue by re-configuring locales using dpkg-reconfigure locales (see below).

[root@debian:/root 6%] # dpkg-reconfigure locales
 Package configuration
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────Configuring locales───────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐─
│ Locales are a framework to switch between multiple languages and allow users to use their language, country, characters,     │
│ collation order, etc.                                                                                                        │
│
│ Please choose which locales to generate. UTF-8 locales should be chosen by default, particularly for new installations.      │
│ Other character sets may be useful for backwards compatibility with older systems and software.                              │
│
│ Locales to be generated:                                                                                                     │
│ ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────↑(-)───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │
│ │                                           [ ] en_US.ISO-8859-15 ISO-8859-15                                              │ │
│ │                                           [*] en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8                                                          │ │
│ │                                           [ ] en_ZA ISO-8859-1                                                           │ │
│ │                                           [ ] en_ZA.UTF-8 UTF-8                                                          │ │
│ │                                           [ ] en_ZM UTF-8                                                                │ │
│ │                                           [ ] en_ZW ISO-8859-1                                                           │ │
│ │                                           [ ] en_ZW.UTF-8 UTF-8                                                          │ │
│ └───────────────────────────────────────────────↓(+)───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────32%─────┘ │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                                           <  OK  >                      <Cancel>                                             │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
  

 Package configuration
 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────Configuring locales───────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Many packages in Debian use locales to display text in the correct language for the user. You can choose a default locale    │
│ for the system from the generated locales.                                                                                   │
│
│ This will select the default language for the entire system. If this system is a multi-user system where not all users       │
│ are able to speak the default language, they will experience difficulties.                                                   │
│
│ Default locale for the system environment:                                                                                   │
│ ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │
│ │                                                      [ ] None                                                            │ │
│ │                                                      [ ] C.UTF-8                                                         │ │
│ │                                                      [*] en_US.UTF-8                                                     │ │
│ └──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                                           <  OK  >                      <Cancel>                                             │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘




Generating locales (this might take a while)...
  en_US.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.
14.661u+2.684s=0:43.05e(40.2%) TDSavg=0k+0k+0k max=64212k 512+5744io 14pf+0sw
[root@debian:/root 7%] # dir /srv/
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 2 nobody nogroup 4096 Mar 16 13:05 继父回家
[root@debian:/root 8%] # dir /srv/继父回家/
total 876952
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nogroup 178467784 Feb 15 19:15 第一集.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nogroup 180803541 Feb 15 21:18 第三集.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nogroup 182210980 Mar 15 22:32 第二集.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nogroup 177843368 Feb 15 22:20 第五集.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nogroup 178652002 Feb 16 11:56 第四集.mp4
[root@debian:/root 9%] #

So it looks like you got it sorted out. Great! Right after I posted I thought about locales and dpkg-reconfigure and the trouble I had long ago with foreign characters. That was going to be my next suggestion, but you beat me to it.

-JT

JT,

I don't recall using dpkg-reconfigure at all. I think if you apt-get install locales, everything should be good.

-bodhi
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