How can I re-add a unicode byte order marker in linux?
Based on sed's solution of Anonymous, sed -i '1s/^/\xef\xbb\xbf/' foo adds the BOM to the UTF-8 encoded file foo. Usefull is that it also converts ASCII files to UTF8 with BOM
To add BOMs to the all the files that start with "foo-", you can use sed. sed has an option to make a backup.
sed -i '1s/^\(\xff\xfe\)\?/\xff\xfe/' foo-*straceing this shows sed creates a temp file with a name starting with "sed". If you know for sure there is no BOM already, you can simplify the command:
sed -i '1s/^/\xff\xfe/' foo-*Make sure you need to set UTF-16, because i.e. UTF-8 is different.
For a general-purpose solution—something that sets the correct byte-order mark regardless of whether the file is UTF-8, UTF-16, or UTF-32—I would use vim’s 'bomb' option:
$ echo 'hello' > foo$ xxd < foo0000000: 6865 6c6c 6f0a hello.$ vim -e -s -c ':set bomb' -c ':wq' foo$ xxd < foo0000000: efbb bf68 656c 6c6f 0a ...hello.(-e means runs in ex mode instead of visual mode; -s means don’t print status messages; -c means “do this”)