Hello,

I'm having problems copying filenames with non-standard characters onto an NTFS partition. I've searched these forums and read FAQs but unfortunately I still receive this error:

$ cp /mnt/nfs/Price£10.txt /data/
cp: cannot stat `/data/Price\24310.txt': Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character

My setup is as follows:

Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop - 2.6.27-11-generic - x64

/mnt/nfs - this is a mountpoint to another Linux box using NFS. To mount, I simply used:


/data - this is a separate hard drive in my Linux box that is formatted with NTFS. This is mounted during boot and is configured in /etc/fstab as the following:


I haven't used the locale option because I'm using ntfs-3g 2009.1.1 as this now has "Built-in, transparent UTF-8 conversion support".



Interestingly, when I map to the /data mountpoint as a share from Vista, I can copy this file into the ntfs volume without any errors, yet doing an ls of this file shows the following:



Another filename called "Siúil-A-Rún.txt" appears as the following if copied using a Vista share:



My Ubuntu locale settings are:



Any help you can offer would be great.

Many thanks,
Paul.

Hi Paul,


True.

Your file names are supposed to be UTF8 encoded and "\243" is not a correct UTF8 char. The correct encoding for "£" is "\302\243" as you can display in "ls -l", so the file name was correctly translated.

Assuming you typed the file name in the cp example, you just have to configure your terminal to used UTF8.

Regards

Jean-Pierre

Hi jpa, thanks for your help.

Indeed this has helped, I'm using Putty and the Character Set Translation was set to ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1 West Europe). Chaging this to UTF-8 helped show the correct characters and prevent the error from occuring.

Many thanks,
Paul.

Hello,


I have nearly the same problem, running a backup script from a cron-job:
cp: cannot create directory `/mnt/usb/backup-27-05-2009/daten/dosapp/Startmen\374': Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character


I'm stuck at telling my cron script to use the correct encoding.

Hi,

Your backup directory name is generated dynamically, probably from a pattern hard coded in some shell script.
Try grepping for "Startmen" to locate and fix the pattern.
If it is generated by a binary program, you may have to dynamically translate its output.

Regards

Jean-Pierre

adding


and changing my mount line to


in my script seems to have solved the problems!

I have recently purchased an Iomega Black Belt external hard drive which is formatted with NTFS. I've been trying to copy FLAC files off my Fedora Core box onto the drive via ntfs-3g to no avail:

[root@localhost ~]# cp /var/tmp/Dr.\ Dog\ -\ 05\ -\ Where\'d\ All\ the\ Time\ Go¦.flac /media/Iomega_HDD_/
cp: cannot stat `/media/Iomega_HDD_/Dr. Dog - 05 - Where\'d All the Time Go\277.flac': Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character

I know this has to with the file name and Unicode support. Even after changing my Putty terminal to use UTF-8, the same error is encountered.

System:

[root@localhost ~]# cat /etc/redhat-release
Fedora release 11 (Leonidas)

[root@localhost ~]# locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

Mounting options located in syslog via hot plug:

Feb 1 23:39:31 localhost ntfs-3g[2613]: Version 2010.5.16 integrated FUSE 27
Feb 1 23:39:31 localhost ntfs-3g[2613]: Mounted /dev/sdb1 (Read-Write, label "Iomega_HDD", NTFS 3.1)
Feb 1 23:39:31 localhost ntfs-3g[2613]: Cmdline options: rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=devkit,uid=500,gid=500,dmask=0077
Feb 1 23:39:31 localhost ntfs-3g[2613]: Mount options: rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=devkit,silent,allow_other,nonempty,relatime,fsname=/dev/sdb1,blkdev,blksize=4096,default_permissions
Feb 1 23:39:31 localhost ntfs-3g[2613]: Global ownership and permissions enforced, configuration type 1

Errror in syslog:

Feb 1 23:46:31 localhost ntfs-3g[2613]: Could not convert filename to Unicode: 'Dr. Dog - 05 - Where'd All the Time Go¦.flac': Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character

I haven't really messed with /etc/fstab as that file typically isn't used for external drives (or is it?).

Please assist as I'm really at wit's end but would prefer to not format to FAT32.

-slainte

Hi,


Your file name must have an illegal utf-8 character. I see (not reliably because of cut-and-paste and possible translations in the process) the sequence '¦.' where '¦' may be 0xa6, the beginning of a two-byte character whose second character cannot be '.' (after 0xa6 you must have a byte in range 0x80-0x9f)
Not being a valid character, it cannot be interpreted and translated to utf-16 as required by ntfs.

To be sure of the diagnosis, please post the file name as hexadecimal, as in


If you access through putty, create the file on ext3 in order to display its name after it has been translated by putty :


Regards

Jean-Pierre

*edit*

I oversaw the error message from cp, in which the said character is returned as \277 this means the character 0xaf, not 0xa6, which confirms the diagnosis because the following character, if it were a legal one, would also have been displayed in octal.