What I meant by corruption is the program might be spewing garbage, instead of simply crashing pointing where encoding problem is.

As for your other point. You're right, but there's no easy way resolving this. Either treat everything as unicode and remember it's binary on linux, or have linux working and everything else broken.

In that scenario you probably should use .encode('utf-8', 'surrogateescape') as soon as you can and work on bytes, so no need of doing the above.

Also, if you for example call os.listdir() with argument in bytes it'll return entries in bytes:

    Python 3.4.1 (default, May 23 2014, 17:48:28) [GCC] on linux
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> import os
    >>> os.listdir(b'.')
    [b'\xff\xff\xff', b'test.py']

But IMO, things still could be better. I would love if there was matching sys.setfiliesystemencoding() to sys.getfilesystemencoding(). In scenarios when you are not sure of encoding you could fall back to iso-8859-1 (latin-1) which has 1:1 mapping for bytes.

Currently looks like you would have to use:

    filename.encode(sys.getfilesystemencoding(), 'surrogateescape').decode('iso-8859-1')