How to read/access a filename with non-ascii characters

Question

I have the following file:

$ ls -l /var/tmp/attachment
-rw-rw-r-- 1 3103 king_kong 27136 Apr  7  2014 å·æ°£ç³»çµ±åæ°´é維修.msg

When I try to list the file specifically, I get a file not found error:

$ ls -l /var/tmp/attachment/å·æ°£ç³»çµ±åæ°´é維修.msg
ls: /var/tmp/attachment/å·æ°£ç³»çµ±åæ°´é維修.msg: No such file or directory

Thus, I can't figure out how to rename this file to have a simpler filename (ascii chars only), like "example.msg".

Ideally, I'd like to read this file in Python. This is clearly not the way to do it:

>>> data = open(r'/var/tmp/attachment/å·æ°£ç³»çµ±åæ°´é維修.msg', 'rb')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/var/tmp/attachment/\xe5\xb7\xe6\xb0\xa3\xe7\xb3\xbb\xe7\xb5\xb1\xe5\xe6\xb0\xb4\xe9\xe7\xb6\xad\xe4\xbf\xae.msg'

Apart from getting the source to save the file with a different name, is there any way to "fix" the filename via command line in linux, or using Python?

Answer 1

When on the shell, your terminal will be trying to translate the byte string to printable chars. It's possible some of the bytes aren't valid chars at all so copy-pasting them is useless.

The easiest was to deal with non-printable filenames on the shell is to use get a file's inode then use find to do something with it.

To get a file's inode:

ls -il

The first column is the inode. Pass this to find:

find . -inum <inode-number> -exec mv {} newfilename.msg \; 

In Python, the trick is open a file with an odd name is to do a file list and pass the resulting string to open.

For example:

os.listdir('/var/tmp/attachment/')

Answer 2

I had this same problem try

data = open(ru'/var/tmp/attachment/å·æ°£ç³»çµ±åæ°´é維修.msg', 'rb')

Answer 3

Such you have one file with '.msg' extension ,try

rename 's/.*/test.msg/' *.msg