Special characters in Samba filenames

Question

When serving files containing special characters such as "()?:" in the filename through Samba, the names get transformed into an unrecognizable format. For example, a file

my_file:_(important).txt

is displayed as

M43J1E~0.TXT

Is there a way to avoid this behavior (without renaming the files, obviously)? I'm assuming that character encoding is not to blame because several UTF-8 characters seem to work fine.

Answer 1

Windows does not allow some characters in filenames that Unix does allow. Samba "mangles" the filenames to make them comply with Windows restrictions. You can check the file /etc/smb.conf or /etc/samba/smb.conf to see what settings are in place. To show those settings plus the defaults, use this command:

testparm -vs | less

To narrow that down a bit:

testparm -vs|grep "case\|mangl"

See this page for more information. Also, see about half way down this page (the same information as the previous link).