2013/8/21 Nick Coghlan <report@bugs.python.org>:
> Which reminds me: I'm curious what "ls" currently does for malformed
> filenames. The aim of this change would be to get 'python -c "import os;
> print(os.listdir())"' to do the best it can to work without losing data in
> such a situation.

The "ls" command works on bytes, not on characters. You can
reimplement "ls" with:

* Unicode: os.listdir(str), os.fsencode() and sys.stdout.buffer
* bytes: os.listdir(bytes) and sys.stdout.buffer

os.fsencode() does exactly the opposite of os.fsdecode(). There is a
unit test to check that :-)

I ensured that all OS functions can be used directly with bytes
filenames in Python 3. That's why I added os.environb for example.