find all UTF-16 files and convert to UTF-8

convert-utf8.sh

#!/bin/bash 
# see https://gist.github.com/yzorg/e4e9813fc07bef4af10ae43febca38d9

# function to convert file to UTF-8
convert_to_utf8() {
  iconv -f UTF-16 -t UTF-8 "$1" -o "$1".utf8
  mv "$1".utf8 "$1"
}

# output the list before making the 1st change
find . -type f -exec file {} \; | grep "UTF-16"

# find all files in subdirectories and convert them to UTF-8 if they are in Unicode-16 format
find . -type f -exec file {} \; | grep "UTF-16" | awk '{print $1}' |
  while read file; do
    convert_to_utf8 "${file:0:-1}"
  done

initial commit is 100% ChatGPT

• the ai generated version didn't handle ":" at the end of $1 file output, so changed from $file to ${file:0:-1}
• it also doesn't handle spaces in directory names (known issue)