Re: Passing unicode filenames to start-process on Windows?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Klaus-Dieter Bauer <bauer.klaus.dieter@gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2016 22:19:39 +0100
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> I thought up some workarounds, but they all run into limitations:
> 
> * w32-short-file-name: Doesn't work, because in modern Windows systems 8.3 file
>   names may not be generated, so it may just return the unchanged filename.
> * rename-file: Allows working with a name via a temporary supported file name.
>   Sadly there is no way to guarantee that such renaming is undone afterwards.
> * copy-file (to a temporary directory): Would work for the current application,
>   but unviable when larger amounts of data are involved. 
> 
> Would you happen to know any other possible workaround?

The only one that would work reliably is to pass arguments via a file
or a pipe.  (Some program support "response files" as a replacement
for command-line arguments, or can read the arguments from stdin.)

Do you really have programs that can support text outside of the
current system codepage?  If you don't, then passing arguments with
such strings is the least of your problems: once you do get these
strings into the program, the program won't be able to do anything
useful with them: all the library functions that receive C strings
will misbehave, you won't be able to open files with such names, etc.

IOW, I'm not sure I understand your use case in enough detail to
provide useful advice.  Perhaps describe what you want to do and the
program you want to invoke from Emacs in more detail.