Languages and character sets

File names, languages, and character sets

File names in languages other than English can use characters that have diacritic marks, or accents, or can use characters that are not even in the Roman alphabet. UNIX and Windows systems can create file names with no restrictions, provided that they do not violate the naming conventions of the operating system that they were created in. The language you select affects multiprotocol behavior and the code page for WIndows 98 and older clients.

File names use character sets

To make sure that file names stored on the filer are usable by both UNIX and Windows applications, you must choose a character set that contains the characters in the language that your clients use. To do so, you choose a language, and the filer uses a character set that is appropriate to the language.

Every volume has a language

Every volume uses a language, and therefore a character set, that you specify for file names. The root volume determines the code page for PCs and the console character set.

Language selection

The language you specify controls the name translation between UNIX and Windows names. If you installed a new filer, you selected a default language when you set up the filer. If you upgraded to Data ONTAP 5.3, you must use the vol lang command to set the language.

Note: If a filer is licensed for CIFS, you must set a language for every volume on the filer.

What a language applies to

The filer uses a character set appropriate to a given language. The language you select determines which character set the filer uses for the following names:

Kinds of character sets supported

The filer supports the following types of character sets. The following table shows what protocols and operating systems use a particular character set. You use this information to determine what directory format you use.

Character set type Description Used by
ASCII A 7-bit character set used by most computers. Does not allow letters with accents; that is, diacritics. NFS, console and log files, qtree names, snapshot names, and volume names.
Unicode A 16-bit character encoding system. It includes all major languages. WIN 32 applications and file names in the following systems:
  • Windows NT
  • Windows 98
  • Windows 95
UNIX A variety of character sets used by UNIX. Can include single-byte and multibyte characters. NFS, console, and log messages
UTF-8 An ASCII-compatible multibyte Unicode encoding. Some Solaris clients
OEM Single or multiple encodings for older clients
  • DOS
  • Windows 98 (except for file names)
  • Windows 95 (except for file names)
  • NT system and domain name

Languages supported

The filer supports the languages shown in the following table. The language code for each language appears next to the language. To override the normal UNIX character set so that a UNIX system uses UTF-8 code, add .UTF-8 to the language code.

You use a language code to specify a language with the vol lang command, as described in "Setting the language of a volume."

Language Language Code
Danish da
Dutch nl
English en
English (US) en_US
Finnish fi
French fr
German de
Hebrew he
Italian it
Japanese euc-j ja
Japanese PCK(sjis) ja_JP.PCK
Norwegian no
Portuguese pt
POSIX (ASCII only for DOS and ISO-Latin1 for NFS. Equivalent to the Sun locale.) C
Spanish es
Swedish sv

How to choose a language

The following flow chart shows how to choose a language.

Language procedures

You can perform the following operations to query and specify the language that a volume uses.
Operation Section
Show what languages the filer supports. "Displaying a list of supported languages"
Specify a language for the console. "Setting the console encoding"
Change the language, and therefore the character set, that a volume uses for file names. "Setting the language of a volume"
Create a volume that uses a specified language other than the default. "Creating a volume that uses a specified language"
Show each volume with the language that it uses. "Displaying which volume uses which language"

Copyright © 1999, Network Appliance, Inc. All rights reserved.

Part No. 210-02334
File: multi5.htm
Last updated: 02/24/99 12:16:17