How to Find and Remove Byte Order Marks (BOM) in UTF-8 Files?

An Ingenious Approach: Locating BOM in UTF-8 Files

The necessity to scour a directory for UTF-8 files adorned with Byte Order Marks (BOMs) arises for debugging purposes. While shell scripts offer a straightforward solution, they may struggle with imperfections like unreadable one-liners or sensitivity to line breaks in filenames.

A Refined Solution

Seeking a more elegant approach, consider this succinct command:

find . -type f -exec sed '1s/^\xEF\xBB\xBF//' -i {} \;

This command leverages the 'find' utility to traverse the specified directory. Files of type 'f' (regular files) are then filtered. For each qualifying file, the 'sed' editor is summoned, executing a substitution on the first line. The string ^xEFxBBxBF commences with a control sequence signifying the start of a line and matches the three characters constituting the BOM: EF BB BF. By replacing this with an empty string, the BOM is effectively erased.

A Precautionary Note

Users are cautioned that this operation is destructive. Binary files containing these characters will be modified. To safeguard against unintended alterations, employ this command instead:

grep -rl $'\xEF\xBB\xBF' .

This amended command remains faithful to 'grep's mission of pattern matching. It retains the ability to identify files containing BOMs without inflicting harm.

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