Ubuntu – Cannot read filenames that are in utf8 encoding (Greek characters)

You are looking for luit which is designed for this purpose:

$ luit -encoding ISO-8859-1 ssh remote.host

It will convert the output of the ssh command to UTF-8 so you don’t need to change the encoding of the terminal.

Assuming you are using utf-8 encoding (the default in Ubuntu), this script should hopefully identify the filenames and rename them for you.

It works by using find with C-encoding (ascii) to locate files with unprintable characters in them. It then tries to determine if these unprintable characters are utf-8 characters or not. If not, it shows you the filenames decoded with each of the encodings listed in the enc array, allowing you to select the one that looks right in order to rename it.

latin1 was commonly used on older linux systems, and windows-1252 is commonly used by windows now adays (I think). iconv -l will show you a list of possible encodings.

#!/bin/bash

# list of encodings to try. (max 10)
enc=( latin1 windows-1252 )

while IFS= read -rd '' file <&3; do
    base=${file##*/} dir=${file%/*}

    # if converting from utf8 to utf8 succeeds, we'll assume the filename is ok.
    iconv -f utf8 <<< "$base" >/dev/null 2>&1 && continue

    # display the filename converted from each enc to utf8
    printf 'In %s:\n' "$dir/"
    for i in "${!enc[@]}"; do
        name=$(iconv -f "${enc[i]}" <<< "$base")
        printf '%2d - %-12s: %s\n' "$i" "${enc[i]}" "$name"
    done
    printf ' s - Skip\n'

    while true; do
        read -p "? " -n1 ans
        printf '\n'
        if [[ $ans = [0-9] && ${enc[ans]} ]]; then
            name=$(iconv -f "${enc[ans]}" <<< "$base")
            mv -iv "$file" "$dir/$name"
            break
        elif [[ $ans = [Ss] ]]; then
            break
        fi
    done
done 3< <(LC_ALL=C find . -depth -name "*[![:print:][:space:]]*" -print0)