Take the 2-minute tour ×

In the Windows operating system I can use unusual characters in the file name by typing the decimal code of the character in the number pad. This way I can access all of the characters in the character set, even if the character doesn't have a corresponding keyboard key.

Is there a way to do something similar using Linux?

share|improve this question

migrated from stackoverflow.com Oct 1 '11 at 4:05

This question came from our site for professional and enthusiast programmers.

Perhaps you're referring to unicode input ?. Here's how you do it on most desktop systems: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_input –  nos Oct 1 '11 at 1:38
add comment

2 Answers

up vote 0 down vote accepted

Probably not the ideal solution, but you can simply use printf to embed the characters. For example, to create a file named 'A' (octal 101), you can do:

$ touch "$(printf '\101')"
share|improve this answer
Or, touch $'\101' in bash. –  grawity Oct 1 '11 at 10:21
add comment

ASCII only covers a certain set of characters, starting at ASCII 0 to ASCII 127. Those numbers above 127 are in heavy conflict, depending on which non-ASCII extension was used.

The general "best" solution to go with for maximum portability these days is one of the Unicode encodings. There are a number of them, but UTF-8 is very popular. When I say there are a number of Unicode encodings, realize that unlike different character sets, all Unicode encodings encode the same characters, they just do it with a different number of bits. UTF-8 attempts to save a lot of disk space / memory if your stuff is mostly ASCII.

In Linux, Gnome offers a "character picker" application, called gnome-character-map, which will allow you to find all of the glyphs in a font for all of the Unicode characters. Note that while it is possible to write a Unicode character, depending on the font you use, there might not be a glyph (or symbol) embedded in the font to display that Unicode character. When you don't have something to display a particular character, sometimes a square will be drawn in the unavailable glyph's place.

I typically cut and paste characters from the character map when I need to do something special; however, there is a sequence to directly type the character in (similar to windows). Do a Shift-Control and then type in the hexadecimal character value (which you can look up in the character map, if necessary).

share|improve this answer
Do a Shift-Control and then type in the hexadecimal character value where? I've tried VI, nautilus, gedit but nothing.. –  Frederico Schardong Oct 1 '11 at 3:41
add comment

Your Answer


