https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=463176
User mfabian@novell.com added comment
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=463176#c3
--- Comment #3 from Mike Fabian 2009-01-23 06:04:33 MST ---
As you have already found yourself, if you use the root settings it
works fine, it works fine as well if you only set LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
for the user and nothing else. This is the default!
Umlauts in old files are screwed up because you entered them in
ISO-8859-1 encoding before the Linux world moved to using UTF-8.
Some programs will detect this automatically, for example vim: If you
load a ISO-8859-1 file into vim and vim is running in UTF-8, vim will
detect that the file is not UTF-8 encoded and will load it as
ISO-88591-1 as a fallback. This cannot work for all encodings, for
example it is not possible to distinguish encodings like ISO-8859-1
and ISO-8859-2 reliably automatically. But for ISO-8859-1 it works
fine in vim.
In other programs it might not work, if you view a ISO-8859-1 encoded
file for example with less running in an xterm using an UTF-8 locale,
the file will not display correctly.
In the long run I think it is best to convert your old files to
UTF-8. You can use recode for that:
recode iso-8859-1..utf-8 file
or you can use iconv.
To convert file *names* to UTF-8, use "convmv".
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