Today at work I had to take a whole set of directory upon directory of files and convert them from one character encoding to UTF-8. Of course, this was instantly a task I said a script should do. And along came the following script. It takes two options one required, defining the character encoding of the files being converted, using the flag “-f”. The other optional, defining the character encoding the files are to be converted to, using the flag “-t”. The second is optional because the default is to convert to is UTF-8. Finally, it accepts an argument list of directories or file names and processes each recurcively going through each directory processing each file and/or directory in it. It ignores all invisible files (those that start with “.”). It will most likely fail for a given file if the character encoding is off. But it will continue with the other files notifing the user that there was an issue.
