Arabic filenames

Arabic Filenames in Linux

Read Arabic Filenames

In order for your file manager to read Arabic filenames properly, you need to specify the character set to be used. There are two environment settings you need to have, which you can either export (using bash) or add to your ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile file.

$ export G_BROKEN_FILENAMES=1

Write Arabic Filenames

It is more common to name files in Arabic via an application or a GUI filemanager. If you were trying to write Arabic filenames via the shell under an X terminal you would need ["Mlterm"] or a similar terminal with UTF-8 support. If you were trying to do this via the console you will probably want to have BiCon installed.

Mount Windows Partition

In order for you to be able to read Arabic filenames from a Windows partition, you need to tell the mount command what character set to use. This is done by the following (assuming your Windows partition resides on /dev/hda3:

# mount -t auto /dev/hda3 /mnt/win/ -oiocharset=utf8

You can also make this permanent by adding it to your /etc/fstab file.

/dev/hda3  /mnt/win vfat  defaults,iocharset=utf8  0 0