<i>&gt; it treats filenames like a binary blob</i><p>Which can result in files with seemingly identical names when one UTF-8-encoded file name uses combining characters and the other one uses precomposed ones. Not to mention the fact that e.g. Å is contained in Unicode as both &quot;latin capital letter A with ring above&quot; and &quot;Angstrom sign&quot;.<p>After you&#x27;ve solved encoding, next comes Unicode normalization ;-)