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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-04T06:59:13+00:00

For non-ASCII characters in file names, Git will output them in octal notation .

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For non-ASCII characters in file names, Git will output them in octal notation. For example:

> git ls-files
"\337.txt"

If such a byte sequence does not represent a legal encoding (for the command line’s current encoding), I’m not able to enter the corresponding String on command line. How can I still invoke Git commands on these files? Obviously, using the String which is displayed by git ls-files does not work:

> git rm "\337.txt"
fatal: pathspec '337.txt' did not match any files

Tested on Windows, with msysgit 1.7.10 (git version 1.7.10.msysgit.1)

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    In Bash, you can use printf for this kind of purpose:

    $ printf "\337.txt"
▒.txt

$ git rm `printf "\337.txt"`  # this would pass the awkward filename to git

    The problem is, obviously, that the shell doesn’t perform octal escaping, neither does git. But printf does.

    Also, echo -e can do octal escaping:

    $ echo -e '\0337.txt'
▒.txt

    But that usage is a bit discouraged, you should prefer printf where you can.

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