[[!comment format=mdwn username="joey" subject="""comment 2""" date="2015-08-03T14:33:38Z" content=""" I was able to reproduce this, but only once I started the assistant with LANG=C. I suspect that the bug reporter's locale in the shell is not the locale the assistant was started with. (Also, I included the French quotes in the filename, which wasn't very clear in the bug report.) The failure to output a debug message is not actually fatal. The file still gets added and committed if it exists when the assistant starts up, despite this "error". What actually seems to be failing is the inotify code. Creating the file while the assistant is running with LANG=C results in no inotify event being received for it. AFAICS, the inotify library is falling over on the filename, before git-annex ever gets to see the file. Hmm, it looks like the inotify library is generating events with filenames that have high bit characters stripped out when run in the C locale! So, git-annex gets an event for a file that's not present, and ignores it. This sure seems like a bug in the inotify library to me. Bug filed: . """]]