How can I convert multiple files to UTF-8 encoding using *nix command line tools?

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Batch-convert files for encoding or line ending

I have a bunch of text files that I'd like to convert from any given charset to UTF-8 encoding.

Are there any command line tools or Perl (or language of your choice) one liners I can use to do this en masse?

Answer 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.