Why is ASCII the default iocharset for FAT partitions?

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Why is ASCII the default iocharset for FAT partitions?

Postby eaburto » Wed Aug 03, 2016 5:38 pm

Hi, I'm new in this forum and this is my first post :).

Given that I'm a Archlinux user in my laptop and is great, I've also been using Archlinux ARM in my Raspberry Pi (first generation model B, if relevant) and wasn't having any problem until today.

I was setting Transmission-cli as torrent client to have a nice 24/7 torrent device and configured a USB flash drive to automount on boot as download storage partition. All good until some torrent start failing to download and sometimes crashing with segfault. By checking the journal the error said something like this:$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'C')ouldn't open <filename path>: Invalid argument
in fdlimit.c:191, torrent.c:537 and inout.c:102. After some time I found the problem was the non-ascii chars of the filename and checking the mount options realize that default iocharset for FAT partitions was ASCII and not ISO8859-1 or UTF-8 as I recalled (and checked in my laptop current config also), so I tried adding the correct argument in fstab and now the problem is gone.

Maybe a more experienced user would've found the problem in a minute, but to me it seems a little more obscure and begun checking transmission bugs first unsuccessfully before getting the right answer.

So I've been questioning why is ASCII the default iocharset instead of ISO8859-1 or UTF-8? Well, I guess there is a technical reason (also, the journal warned me now that UTF-8 made my FAT filesystem case-sensitive, that seems like no problem at all to me, but what do I know) but I couldn't find it.

Thanks beforehand for any answer given! :D
Greetings from Chile! :)
eaburto
 
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Re: Why is ASCII the default iocharset for FAT partitions?

Postby WarheadsSE » Thu Aug 04, 2016 3:09 am

It most likely defaults that way as a matter of backward compatibility for other devices. Not all things support unicode, so it is safer to assume down than up.
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