too long Filenames or missformat?

Question

I tried to sync from local to ubuntu one files with filenames as:

"176 - Deutsche Geschichte - Ein Versuch Vol 05-Von der Revolution bis zum Drei�igj�hrigen Krieg - 01.mp3 (ungültige Kodierung)"

Ubuntu one sync breaks on this filenames and nautilus is shutting down the local filebrowser window by itself.

Are these Filenames too long for Ubuntu one? Or is it the (ungültige Kodierung) (mis encoded) at the end of the file?

Answer 1

The problem

German umlauts ä,ö,ü and UTF-8 encoding are the problem here. Most likely you copied the files from a windows system (using ISO-8859-1 encoding) to a linux system (using UTF-8). A computer can only store bits. The mapping of a combination of bits to a real character a human can read is called the encoding. E.g. using UTF-8 the letter a is encoded as 01100001. For umlauts those bit sequences differ in the two encodings, so a UTF-8 system displays another character or doesn't know the bit sequence alltogether. That's the whole problem.

The solution

With the shell program convmv / sudo apt-get install convmv you can rename files with broken umlauts to their correct UTF-8 charset. Usage:

convmv --notest -r -f ISO8859-1 -t UTF-8 <Verzeichnisname

Run that on your files after installing convmv by clicking on the Software Center icon above or using the shell command provided next to it. Then try syncing again.

Good luck on sharing German history! :D

Answer 2

You can also revert the conversion by calling convmv the other way round. Then you can look for the correct charset, try cp850.