Solution 1:

I faced the same issue in MSYS Git 2.8.0 and as it turned out it just needed changing the configuration.

$ git --version

git version 2.8.0.windows.1

The default configuration of Git Bash console in my system did not show Greek filenames.

$cd ~

$ls

AppData/
'Application Data'@
Contacts/
Cookies@
Desktop/
Documents/
Downloads/
Favorites/
Links/
'Local Settings'@
NTUSER.DAT
.
.
.
''$'\316\244\316\261'' '$'\316\255\316\263\316\263\317\201\316\261\317\206\316\254'' '$'\316\274\316\277\317\205'@

The last line should display "Τα έγγραφά μου", the greek translation of "My Documents". In order to fix it I followed the below steps:

  1. Check your existing locale configuration

    $locale
    
    LANG=en
    LC_CTYPE="C"
    LC_NUMERIC="C"
    LC_TIME="C"
    LC_COLLATE="C"
    LC_MONETARY="C"
    LC_MESSAGES="C"
    LC_ALL=
    

    As shown above, in my case it was not UTF-8

  2. Change the locale to a UTF-8 encoding. Click the icon on the left side of MINGW title bar, select "Options" and in the "Text" category choose "UTF-8" Character set. You should also choose a unicode font, such as the default "Lucida Console". My configuration looks as following: MinGW locale configuration

  3. Change the language for the current window (no need to do this on future windows, as they will be created with the settings of step 2)

     $ LANG='C.UTF-8'
    
  4. The ls command should now display properly

    AppData/
    'Application Data'@
    Contacts/
    Cookies@
    Desktop/
    Documents/
    Downloads/
    Favorites/
    Links/
    'Local Settings'@
    NTUSER.DAT
    .
    .
    .
    'Τα έγγραφά μου'@
    

Solution 2:

Found this answer elsewhere:

chcp.com 65001

Git bash chcp windows7 encoding issue

That's what actually solved it for me.

Solution 3:

As CharlesB said in a comment, msysgit 1.7.10 handles unicode correctly. There are still a few issues but I can confirm that updating did solve the issue I was having.

See: https://github.com/msysgit/msysgit/wiki/Git-for-Windows-Unicode-Support