Shell is like most of the programs doesn't need to bother about encoding of filenames. Mostly doesn't. I could use LANG=C and then TAB autocompletes filenames even cyrillic ones, because bash wouldn't mind encodings: terminal uses utf8, so it could output utf8 without any help from bash. Though it nevertheless pain to work with this sometimes, because readline fails to count visible characters (counting bytes instead). You type chars into command line, fill it to the end, then cursor jumps to the left side of the terminal and continues, placing characters over other characters. It is like \r used instead of \n.
`LANG=C ls` tries to be smarter and uses escape-syntax for everything except printable ASCII characters. But other utilities from coreutils work even with a locale that doesn't match file name encoding. cp, mv, grep, ...
The point is: it doesn't matter what encoding strings use until you tried to render string on a screen.
`LANG=C ls` tries to be smarter and uses escape-syntax for everything except printable ASCII characters. But other utilities from coreutils work even with a locale that doesn't match file name encoding. cp, mv, grep, ...
The point is: it doesn't matter what encoding strings use until you tried to render string on a screen.