No. Different users might be running different locales, and those mentioned "old" applications might assume filenames to be in users' locale encodings. Of course, if some user switches locales often, then all kinds of mess-ups might occur, unless she's consistently using UTF-8 (or other language-agnostic encoding) for naming files.
So essentially, what this amounts to is that: you cannot prevent junk being displayed when a user does an "ls" at the prompt. Essentially users are shooting each other in the foot in as far as display of file names is concerned. right? Shesh. -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
