The UTF-8 standard leaves room for some ambiguities which lead to problems when moving files from one system to another, especially *.md5 files if the filenames are converted during the move, but the corresponding lines in the *.md5 file is not.

The iconv utility on OS X is able to handle that by using the label UTF-8-MAC for the encoding of the OS X side of the conversion, but this needs to be done on OS X as this encoding is not available e.g. on Debian wheezy.

Credits:

• Strange character encoding issues caused by OS X to Ubuntu rsyncing (NFD => NFC) by DanielBuus on the Ubuntuforums to point me to the searchterms “NFC vs. NFD”
• mtt2p on Stackexchange to show me the encoding name UTF-8-MAC

OSX iconv UTF8