iconv any encoding to UTF-8

Maybe you are looking for enca:

Enca is an Extremely Naive Charset Analyser. It detects character set and encoding of text files and can also convert them to other encodings using either a built-in converter or external libraries and tools like libiconv, librecode, or cstocs.

Currently it supports Belarusian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Slovene, Ukrainian, Chinese, and some multibyte encodings independently on language.

Note that in general, autodetection of current encoding is a difficult process (the same byte sequence can be correct text in multiple encodings). enca uses heuristics based on the language you tell it to detect (to limit the number of encodings). You can use enconv to convert text files to a single encoding.

You can get what you need using standard gnu utils file and awk. Example:

file -bi .xsession-errorsgives me:"text/plain; charset=us-ascii"

so file -bi .xsession-errors |awk -F "=" '{print $2}'gives me"us-ascii"

I use it in scripts like so:

CHARSET="$(file -bi "$i"|awk -F "=" '{print $2}')"if [ "$CHARSET" != utf-8 ]; then  iconv -f "$CHARSET" -t utf8 "$i" -o outfilefi

Here is my solution to in place all files using recode and uchardet:

#!/bin/bashapt-get -y install recode uchardet > /dev/nullfind "$1" -type f | while read FFN # 'dir' should be changed...do  encoding=$(uchardet "$FFN")  echo "$FFN: $encoding"  enc=`echo $encoding | sed 's#^x-mac-#mac#'`  set +x  recode $enc..UTF-8 "$FFN"done

put it into convert-dir-to-utf8.sh and run:

bash convert-dir-to-utf8.sh /pat/to/my/trash/dir

Note that sed is a workaround for mac encodings here.Many uncommon encodings need workarounds like this.