Making a new locale file for Linux, and getting it accepted as a standard

As noted by others, there isn't really an answer to this: filenames and paths do not have an encoding; the OS only deals with sequence of bytes. Individual applications may choose to interpret them as being encoded in some way, but this varies.

Specifically, Glib (used by Gtk+ apps) assumes that all file names are UTF-8 encoded, regardless of the user's locale. This may be overridden with the environment variables G_FILENAME_ENCODING and G_BROKEN_FILENAMES.

On the other hand, Qt defaults to assuming that all file names are encoded in the current user's locale. An individual application may choose to override this assumption, though I do not know of any that do, and there is no external override switch.

Modern Linux distributions are set up such that all users are using UTF-8 locales and paths on foreign filesystem mounts are translated to UTF-8, so this difference in strategies generally has no effect. However, if you really want to be safe, you cannot assume any structure about filenames beyond "NUL-terminated, '/'-delimited sequence of bytes".

(Also note: locale may vary by process. Two different processes run by the same user may be in different locales simply by having different environment variables set.)

The same exact thing happened to me. Building on what Thomas said above, I was able to fix it by uncommenting en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 in my /etc/locale.gen file (previously none of the lines had been uncommented), then running locale-gen.