Adding BOM to UTF-8 files

Question

I'm searching (without success) for a script, which would work as a batch file and allow me to prepend a UTF-8 text file with a BOM if it doesn't have one.

Neither the language it is written in (perl, python, c, bash) nor the OS it works on, matters to me. I have access to a wide range of computers.

I've found a lot of scripts to do the reverse (strip the BOM), which sounds to me as kind of silly, as many Windows program will have trouble reading UTF-8 text files if they don't have a BOM.

Did I miss the obvious?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I wrote this addbom.sh using the 'file' command and ICU's 'uconv' command.

#!/bin/sh  if [ $# -eq 0 ] then         echo usage $0 files ...         exit 1 fi  for file in "$@" do         echo "# Processing: $file" 1>&2         if [ ! -f "$file" ]         then                 echo Not a file: "$file" 1>&2                 exit 1         fi         TYPE=`file - < "$file" | cut -d: -f2`         if echo "$TYPE" | grep -q '(with BOM)'         then                 echo "# $file already has BOM, skipping." 1>&2         else                 ( mv "${file}" "${file}"~ && uconv -f utf-8 -t utf-8 --add-signature < "${file}~" > "${file}" ) || ( echo Error processing "$file" 1>&2 ; exit 1)         fi done 

edit: Added quotes around the mv arguments. Thanks @DirkR and glad this script has been so helpful!