Often I have had a problem passing text files from a machine to other one, because I loose the especial characters. This happens when the machines use different codification tables.
So at the moment is prevailing the UTF-8, an universal codification table. Now, I try to use this table in my text files. With this purpose I programmed a BASH shell script to change recursively the encoding of every file into a directory to UTF-8 encoding.
Download: 2utf8
The usage is very simple, just execute the script passing the base directory name as parameter.
Important note: This program is GPL so this is distributed whitout any warranty. I can’t guarantee the good operation of this script, make a backup before and USE IT UNDER YOUR OWN RISK.