# locale settings and displaying file names in multiple languages



## Jago (Mar 3, 2010)

Hello

I have a 8.0/amd64 system serving a few Samba shares. Windows clients write files to some of these shares using multiple languages: english, finnish and russian. When accessed from any given Windows client, the file and directory names all look correct. However when accessing these same files locally, the file- and directory names that utilize russian and finnish languages are full of question marks, like this for russian:


```
-rw-r--r--  1 nobody  nobody    11M Feb 21  2008 ???????????? ??????????
-rw-r--r--  1 nobody  nobody   9.2M Feb 21  2008 ??????????-??????????????????
-rw-r--r--  1 nobody  nobody   6.3M Feb 21  2008 ?????????????????? ????...
-rw-r--r--  1 nobody  nobody   7.6M Feb 21  2008 ???????????????????????? ????????
-rw-r--r--  1 nobody  nobody   7.1M Feb 21  2008 ?????????????? ????????
-rw-r--r--  1 nobody  nobody   7.7M Feb 21  2008 ??????????????
```

and like this for finnish:


```
drwxr-xr-x    2 nobody  nobody       13 Mar  2 03:20 Turmion K??til??t - Hoitovirhe
drwxr-xr-x    2 nobody  nobody        7 Mar  2 03:20 Turmion K??til??t - Niuva 20
drwxr-xr-x    2 nobody  nobody       13 Mar  2 03:20 Turmion K??til??t - Pirun Nyrkki
drwxr-xr-x    2 nobody  nobody       12 Mar  2 03:20 Turmion K??til??t - U.S.C.H.!
```

And operating on these files locally is tricky to say the least: for example I cannot do a: cd "???????????? ??????????" for obvious reasons, because there is no directory that REALLY has all those question marks. However, I am still able to browse and operate on these files using Midnight Commander, somehow it actually works. How do I need to set the locale settings on the FreeBSD machine so that all file names are displayed correctly when operated on locally?


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## ch (Jan 2, 2013)

I wish I knew, good sir. I wish I knew.

I as well require support for multiple language encodings and I am always dismayed when trying to chat on Russian IRC channels, as all text shows up as \x123y. 

Alas...


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