Rsync 3.0.0pre8 and Mac OS X

Rudolf E. Reiber rudolfreiber at mac.com
Wed Jan 23 15:01:41 GMT 2008


Hi,

I tried Rsync 3.0.0pre8 on my mac running os X 10.5.

I was very pleased about the --iconv feature, as i have to sync some  
LINUX-machines and I had really trouble with some filenames.
But I found one strange thing in connection with the mac.

First of all, the translation between the LINUX ISO-8859-15 and the  
mac ut-8 works (nearly) perfect.

As I live in Germany, we have often filenames containing special  
characters (Umlaute like äöuÄÖÜ).
And all the filenames look perfect on my mac.

But whenever I run rsync again, all the files containing one of this  
special character in the name are deleted and copied again.
And these are quite a lot.

I found the reason for this behavoiur.
Let me explain it with the example of the letter ä (&uuml) in HTML.
On the LINUX machines running utf-8 the ä is coded as $C3A4 which is  
in utf-8 equal to the character E4. The ä occupies in that way 2 bytes.

I was very astonished, when I copied a mac-filename, pasted into a  
texteditor and looked at the file:

In the mac-filename the letter ä is coded as: $61CC88, which in utf-8  
means the letter "a" followed by a $0308. (Combining diacritical marks)
So the Mac combines the letter a with the two points above it instead  
using the E4 letter
Now the things are clear: The filenames are different, in spite of  
looking equally.

A question to the developers: do you see any solution to this problem?  
Perhaps a --icont=utf8mac, iso885915 ?

Rudolf E. Reiber

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Rudolf E. Reiber
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71263 Weil der Stadt
Tel: 07033 44228

rudolfreiber at mac.com
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