(I'm still trying to decipher what they've done with the file system, and still trying to figure out how to get the terminal app to show the Japanese names for files. My brother in law has a book that shows a way that is supposed to even get it to show shift-JIS file names correctly in the terminal app, but I haven't got it to work on my iBook yet.)
See "Japanese in OS X 10.2 Terminal" (in Japanese) <http://member.nifty.ne.jp/poseidon/osx2t.html>
File names in OS X are encoded in UTF-8 decomposition form. I.e. U+30C0: KATAKANA LETTER DA is represented as 0xE382BF (U+30BF) followed by 0xE38299 (U+3099).
UTF-8 aware tcsh is available as <ftp://ftp.tba.org.tohoku.ac.jp/pub/tcsh-6.12-bin.tgz>
If you need install instructions in English, please see my posting to another list.
<http://listserv.dartmouth.edu/scripts/ wa.exe?A2=ind0306&L=nisus&T=0&F=&S=&P=40940>
(Of course, this is all off topic unless somebody wants to come up with some perl code for trying to undo garbled file names.)
It's not a perl script, but nkf -- Network Kanji code conversion Filter -- is able to guess Japanese encodings and to restore broken JIS-Kanji. The garbled text in the original poster's message does not seem to be Japanese though. nkf is available as a part of jx package -- Japanese aware Unix tools for OS X.
<http://www.fan.gr.jp/~sakai/jx.html>
BTW there are free text editors which autodetect Japanese encodings properly in most cases.
CocoaEditorJ (seems to be discontinued) <http://cocoedit.hp.infoseek.co.jp/> <http://cocoedit.hp.infoseek.co.jp/CocoaEditorJ.dmg> (binary) <http://cocoedit.hp.infoseek.co.jp/CocoaEditorJSource.dmg> (source)
KEdit (syntax colouring for perl, php, html)
<http://www.drycarbon.com/macosx/kedit/>
<http://www.drycarbon.com/macosx/archive/kedit010-20030619.zip> (binary and source)
Dunno if they would help you in making money though ;-)
Kino
