From Linux Man Pages
convmv - converts filenames from one encoding to another
convmv [options] FILE(S) ... DIRECTORY(S)
OPTIONS
-f ENCODING
specify the current encoding of the filename(s) from which should be converted
-t ENCODING
specify the encoding to which the filename(s) should be converted
-i interactive mode (ask y/n for each action)
-r recursively go through directories
--nfc
target files will be normalization form C for UTF-8 (Linux etc.)
--nfd
target files will be normalization form D for UTF-8 (OS X etc.).
--qfrom , --qto
be more quiet about the "from" or "to" of a rename (if it screws up your terminal e.g.). This will in fact do
nothing else than replace any non-ASCII character (bytewise) with ? and any control character with * on
printout, this does not affect rename operation itself.
--exec command
execute the given command. You have to quote the command and #1 will be substituted by the old, #2 by the new
filename. Using this option link targets will stay untouched.
Example:
convmv -f latin1 -t utf-8 -r --exec "echo #1 should be renamed to #2" path/to/files
--list
list all available encodings. To get support for more Chinese or Japanese encodings install the Perl HanExtra
or JIS2K Encode packages.
--lowmem
keep memory footprint low by not creating a hash of all files. This disables checking if symlink targets are
in subtree. Symlink target pointers will be converted regardlessly. If you convert multiple hundredthousands
or millions of files the memory usage of convmv might grow quite high. This option would help you out in that
case.
--nosmart
by default convmv will detect if a filename is already UTF8 encoded and will skip this file if conversion
from some charset to UTF8 should be performed. "--nosmart" will also force conversion to UTF-8 for such
files, which might result in "double encoded UTF-8" (see section below).
--notest
Needed to actually rename the files. By default convmv will just print what it wants to do.
--replace
if the file to which shall be renamed already exists, it will be overwritten if the other file content is
equal.
--unescape
this option will remove this ugly % hex sequences from filenames and turn them into (hopefully) nicer 8-bit
characters. After --unescape you might want to do a charset conversion. This sequences like %20 etc. are
sometimes produced when downloading via http or ftp.
--upper , --lower
turn filenames into all upper or all lower case. When the file is not ASCII-encoded, convmv expects a charset
to be entered via the -f switch.
--dotlessi
care about the dotless i/I issue. A lowercase version of "I" will also be dotless while an uppercase version
of "i" will also be dotted. This is an issue for Turkish and Azeri.
By the way: The superscript dot of the letter i was added in the Middle Ages to distinguish the letter (in
manuscripts) from adjacent vertical strokes in such letters as u, m, and n. J is a variant form of i which
emerged at this time and subsequently became a separate letter.
--help
print a short summary of available options
DESCRIPTION
convmv is meant to help convert a single filename, a directory tree and the contained files or a whole filesystem
into a different encoding. It just converts the filenames, not the content of the files. A special feature of
convmv is that it also takes care of symlinks, also converts the symlink target pointer in case the symlink tar-
get is being converted, too.
All this comes in very handy when one wants to switch over from old 8-bit locales to UTF-8 locales. It is also
possible to convert directories to UTF-8 which are already partly UTF-8 encoded. convmv is able to detect if cer-
tain files are UTF-8 encoded and will skip them by default. To turn this smartness off use the "--nosmart"
switch.
Filesystem issues
Almost all POSIX filesystems do not care about how filenames are encoded, here are some exceptions:
HFS+ on OS X / Darwin
Linux and (most?) other Unix-like operating systems use the so called normalization form C (NFC) for its UTF-8
encoding by default but do not enforce this. Darwin, the base of the Macintosh OS enforces normalization form D
(NFD), where a few characters are encoded in a different way. On OS X it's not possible to create NFC UTF-8 file-
names because this is prevented at filesystem layer. On HFS+ filenames are internally stored in UTF-16 and when
converted back to UTF-8, for the underlying BSD system to be handable, NFD is created. If someone knows why Apple
chose to do this, please let me know. I think it was a very bad idea and breaks many things under OS X which
expect a normal POSIX conforming system. Anywhere else convmv is able to convert files from NFC to NFD or vice
versa which makes interoperability with such systems a lot easier.
JFS
If people mount JFS partitions with iocharset=utf8, there is a similar problem, because JFS is designed to store
finenames internally in UTF-16, too; that is because Linux' JFS is really JFS2, which was a rewrite of JFS for
OS/2. JFS partitions should always be mounted with iocharset=iso8859-1, which is also the default with recent
2.6.6 kernels. If this is not done, JFS does not behave like a POSIX filesystem and it might happen that certain
files cannot be created at all, for example filenames in ISO-8859-1 encoding. Only when interoperation with OS/2
is needed iocharset should be set according to your used locale charmap.
NFS4
Despite other POSIX filesystems RFC3530 (NFS 4) mandates UTF-8 but also says: "The nfs4_cs_prep profile does not
specify a normalization form. A later revision of this specification may specify a particular normalization
form." In other words, if you want to use NFS4 you might find the conversion and normalization features of convmv
quite useful.
FAT/VFAT and NTFS
NTFS and VFAT (for long filenames) use UTF-16 internally to store filenames. You should not need to convert
filenames if you mount one of those filesystems. Use appropriate mount options instead!
How to undo double UTF-8 (or other) encoded filenames
Sometimes it might happen that you "double-encoded" certain filenames, for example the file names already were
UTF-8 encoded and you accidently did another conversion from some charset to UTF-8. You can simply undo that by
converting that the other way round. The from-charset has to be UTF-8 and the to-charset has to be the from-
charset you previously accidently used. You should check to get the correct results by doing the conversion with-
out "--notest" before, also the "--qfrom" option might be helpful, because the double utf-8 file names might
screw up your terminal if they are being printed - they often contain control sequences which do funny things
with your terminal window. If you are not sure about the charset which was accidently converted from, using
"--qfrom" is a good way to fiddle out the required encoding without destroying the file names finally.
How to repair Samba files
When in the smb.conf (of Samba 2.x) there hasn't been set a correct "character set" variable, files which are
created from Win* clients are being created in the client's codepage, e.g. cp850 for western european languages.
As a result of that the files which contain non-ASCII characters are screwed up if you "ls" them on the Unix
server. If you change the "character set" variable afterwards to iso8859-1, newly created files are okay, but the
old files are still screwed up in the Windows encoding. In this case convmv can also be used to convert the old
Samba-shared files from cp850 to iso8859-1.
By the way: Samba 3.x finally maps to UTF-8 filenames by default, so also when you migrate from Samba 2 to Samba
3 you might have to convert your file names.
RELATED
locale(1) utf-8(7) charsets(7)
BUGS
no bugs or fleas known
CATEGORY