Converting all files to UTF-8 ?

[Klaus Alexander Seistrup]

Perhaps I'm wrong, but you will probably be unable to convert "binary"
files like MP3s to UTF-8.  Text files shoud be ok, though.

The reason for this is that some characters in ISO-8859-1 (which is
probably your old charset) takes up two bytes in UTF-8:

$ echo 'brûlée' | iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8
brûlée
$ 

So a binary file will get "out of sync" when some of the bytes are
expanded from one to two bytes.

On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 04:15:58 +0100, Vincent Trouilliez
<vincent.trouilliez at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> Trying to get my CD burner today, revealed that the system doesn't quite
> like running  UTF-8 (switched recently) when the files are still using
> the previous format (whatever that was, don't have a clue)
> 
> So, I am would like to convert all my file names to UTF-8 so that,
> hopefully, everything will go smoothly afterwards.
> 
> I read recently on this list about "iconv". I read the man page, then
> tried it a single file, like this:
> 
> 'iconv -t UTF-8 filename'
> 
> But it returns the error : "Illegal escape sequence at position 0".
> It's translater from French, so please feel free to interpret it so
> that, hopefully, it means something. ;-)
> I tried that on several mp3 files and it keeps returning that error.
> 
> Any idea ? Or any other prgram I could use, to convert the thousand
> files in my /home partition ???

-- 
Klaus Alexander Seistrup
SubZeroNet · Copenhagen · Denmark