Hi,
I'm in the process of migrating a Windows fileserver to Linux Centos 6.4 and I face the following problem:
The customer has really long paths more than 255 characters long. The problem is that the folder names are in greek an while they are transferre to linux whith any method (cp, rsycn, mount cifs and then copy files) I get the "Filename too long error'. As far as I understood while researching the problem is that Greek characters are stored in linux as double byte and this exceeds the limit of 255 characters. I tried to use iconv=UTF-8, ISO-8859-7 to no luck (errors from rsync) so I'm fully stacked and cannot migrate the server ..
Any ideas?
The conversion was done with the expectation that if i set the linux locale to ISO-8859-7 the greek characters will be stored as single bytes. But the conversion give errors..
Thanks in advance for any help.

A filename is just a string of bytes that does not include NUL or '/' and it is up to you what you put in it. If you want single-byte Greek characters you need iso 8859-7 encoding. UTF-8 and any others will give multi-byte. You'll need to set LC_ALL or at least LC_CTYPE properly as described here (I think):

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Hellenic-HOWTO-4.html

Thanks a lot for your help. The problem is that (it seems) in Windows the filename are saved as Unicode , so i cannot simply use ISO-8859-7 since the characters are not recognized.. Tha is why i tried to use --iconv option with rsync, but it didn't work..