This post is a supplement to an earlier post on this blog on Unicode and multilingual support in operating systems. It highlights one way to take advantage of Unicode support in most modern OSes.

Most popular filesystems today are quite flexible when it comes to the rules they place on filenames (remember MS-DOS and it's 8.3 file format?). Almost all filesystems allow for upto 255 characters, and while FAT32 and NTFS allow any valid Unicode character to make up its filenames, ext2 and ext3 can allow any byte except NULL.

Why am I going on about it? Well, quite obviously, this means that my files can be named in any language I choose! Quite obvious, indeed... but loads and bucketloads of fun! I've already transliterated many of my मराठी mp3s to their देवनागिरी equivalents. Instead of a very non-Indian 'gaara vaara ha bharaaraa.mp3, I now have a much more satisfying 'गार वारा हा भरारा.mp3'. Pretty neat huh?

In fact, I'm so thrilled about the whole thing that I even have a snapshot ready to show you (the same way most fathers have snaps of their kids in their wallets). This is a snapshot of a few files displayed in Windows Explorer :

The cherry on the cake is that most GUI consoles on Linux already support Unicode, so you can actually work with Unicode filenames through the omnipotent console!

There are definite plus points in taking advantage of Unicode support in this way, but for the benefit of a few of my readers, I'd like to mention that it doesn't come without its set of disadvantages. Don't get excited and attempt to rename all your files in one go if you don't have a keyboard to facilitate easy typing in your language. Not only will renaming a few thousand files initially take eons, but functions like file search will now require you to type keywords in your language! Besides, Unicode compatibility hasn't spread everywhere, and alas, you'll often come across software that garbles the filenames. But apart from these setbacks, this has got to be the coolest thing you can do today!