ADSM-L

Re: Locale on Unix

2005-09-30 07:40:14
Subject: Re: Locale on Unix
From: Rainer Schöpf <rainer.schoepf AT PROTEOSYS DOT COM>
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 13:39:51 +0200
On Fri, 30 Sep 2005, Loon, E.J. van - SPLXM wrote:

 > Hi *SMers! On our 5.2.4.0 Linux client, files with special characters 
 > are not backed up. TSM logs the following error in the dsmerror.log:
 > 
 > 09.05.2005 02:02:00 fioScanDirEntry(): Object 
 > '/usr/share/sane/descripth¤xÃ-extrnal' contains unrecognized symbols for 
 > current locale, skipping...
 > 
 > It does so for all files with special characters.
 > Does anybody know how to solve this?

Solve, no. Get around, yes.

TSM checks characters in filenames against the current locale. The 
filename quoted looks like UTF-8 to me, so you should set the locale to 
UTF-8 before starting the client.

For example, my startup script for the TSM scheduler contains:

LC_CTYPE=de_DE@euro ; export LC_CTYPE

In your case 

LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 ; export LC_CTYPE

might be appropriate, but make sure that this locale is known. "locale -a" 
lists all known locales.

A word of warning: if you have filenames containing characters from 
different locales, you will have a problem anyway. Which is why I find 
this particular TSM design, well, questionable. A Unix filename can 
contain (nearly) every of the 256 possible one byte characters. A backup 
system should accept all of them. In my opinion, the locale is for the 
user interaction, not for system internals.

On the other hand, I think I understand why the TSM client behaves this 
way. The whole locale concept breaks down when you assign meaning to 
filenames, simply because a file called "äöü" in iso-8859-1 will seem to 
have a different name if looked at with locale set to iso-8859-2.

 Regards,
   Rainer Schöpf

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