GE> Ben Wing <ben(a)666.com&gt; writes: GE> Oh, of course, sorry. GE> The bug report I was looking at referred to a crash in our error() GE> function in a LANG=de_DE environment. Obviously the string _passed_ to GE> error contained the non-ASCII characters. GE> for example, what about this code in fileio.c: GE> error ("IO error reading %s: %s", GE> XSTRING_DATA (filename), strerror (saverrno)); GE> now surely *this* is wrong or am I missing something again? Yes. the first argument is in the internal encoding, the second in an external one. Crash. An audit would look at all the strerror calls in the code. Check out lisp_strerror Lisp_Object lisp_strerror (int errnum) { return build_ext_string (strerror (errnum), Qnative); } Probably an invention of mine. You can't quite replace calls to strerror with calls to lisp_strerror, but it's a good idea. Martin