encode file names with german umlauts into proper utf8

Once in a while, I do find old windows backups with some special wrong encoding on german umlauts (represented as question mark). Which in general means – call everything with quotes on the shell, or convert them all to utf-8.

Luckily, someone else already made a handy tool for that, allowing to specify input/output encoding as well as recursively.

# apt-get install convmv

First test which file names would be transformed in the current directory.

$ convmv -f latin1 -t utf-8 -r .

Then add –notest as suggested and watch the perfect new encoding 🙂

$ convmv -f latin1 -t utf-8 -r . --notest