Terminal and Unicode

[Christian Heinze]

Hello everyone,

I encountered a problem on Terminal due to a character conversion. I was 
trying to samba-mount a share in my local network that contains a german 
umlaut. The command went like this:

'smbmount //HOST/öffentlich ~/mnt/'

I always got of with the error message 'No such share found'. Since 
Nautilus, the GNOME file manager, has no problem finding and accessing 
this share, I figured that it must be a character conversion issue. Some 
helpful fellow on the #xfce channel pointed out for me how to convert 
the umlaut into unicode. I repeated the above command, the 'ö' replaced 
with the appropriate unicode notation, and it worked.

It is of course inconvinient to always type this command with a 
cryptic-looking unicode character inside. Thus my question is: what 
character encoding does Terminal use, and how is it possible to change 
this encoding to utf-8 (=unicode)?

I realize that this question might be off-topic here. Probably it is 
more an issue of the underlying command shell or the underlying Linux 
system - Bash and Debian in my case, respectively. I'm asking this 
question here because I don't know much about configuring a character 
encoding, so I start where I encountered the problem - on Terminal, 
which is part of XFCE. I'll happily take advice where else I can 
preferrably ask this question.

Regards,
-- 
* Christian Heinze
* GnuPG KeyID: 0x036DA269 @ www.pca.dfn.de/pgpkserv