Oddly, the test app shows the accents in the File's path, while the file continues to not show the accents in WinSCP, even though if you directly upload the file using WinSCP, it shows the accents then, in both the local and remote view.
Added display of the uploaded File's path, absolute path, canonical path (more system dependent), as well as the parent folder's children's canonical paths.
Subversion 34907
The page output is now showing the path and absolute path as having the accents and the canonical paths as being questions marks, like we see in WinSCP. Coupled with the fact that WAR deployment writes out the files with questions marks instead of accents, points to a Linux admin or WebSphere admin issue with character encodings. So we'll test with Tomcat 7 on an Amazon instance and see if that has the problem as well.
Tomcat 7 on this Linux Amazon instance does in fact have the same problem. Turns out that while OS X internally encodes files in UTF-16 and includes all the character encoding conversion to make that work, Linux doesn't care nor involve itself in filename character encoding, and thus every application needs to do it properly. There are environment variables that guide libc using applications in accomplishing this, but the JVM may need to be configured differently, since it doesn't seem to respond to those environment variables being set on the commandline before executing the Tomcat process.
The same issue was found on WAS 7.0.0.0.