Multi-byte locales

[Florian Weimer]

It seems that with Sun's JDK, some files are unaccessible if you run
in a multi-byte locale (something which uses UTF-8, for example)
because it's not possible to specify an UTF-16 string which is encoded
to the name of the file you are interested, provided that the file has
a name which is not a valid character sequence in the current locale.
(This is not a big deal on UCS-2/UTF-16 platforms, but I'm not really
sure what the designers thought when they tried to fit this model on
UNIX.)

Is there some GNU extension which can work around this issue?  On a
related note, is it possible to access the command line as an array of
byte arrays?