How can I convert multiple files to UTF-8 encoding using *nix command line tools? [duplicate]
Solution 1:
iconv does convert between many character encodings. So adding a little bash magic and we can write
for file in *.txt; do
iconv -f ascii -t utf-8 "$file" -o "${file%.txt}.utf8.txt"
done
This will run iconv -f ascii -t utf-8 to every file ending in .txt, sending the recoded file to a file with the same name but ending in .utf8.txt instead of .txt.
It's not as if this would actually do anything to your files (because ASCII is a subset of UTF-8), but to answer your question about how to convert between encodings.