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Asked: 2026-05-27T04:42:17+00:00

I don’t know how to execute a command with a variable and get the

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I don’t know how to execute a command with a variable and get the result of this.
I have many .h and .c files and I need convert each from ISO-8859 to UTF-8.

So I make:

ls | grep "\.[ch]" | xargs myscript.sh

And in my script, the filename is in variable $1. Now I need to perform

iconv -f ISO-8859 -t UTF-8 $1

and store result of this, because iconv prints to stdout.

result=`iconv -f ISO-8859 -t UTF-8 $1`

echo $result

This seems to be not working, because it gives me some mismatch instead of converted $1.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you need to do some kind of transformation on the data first, you can “capture” output with the following syntax:

    result="$(iconv -f ISO-8859 -t UTF-8 $1)"

    There is a gotcha here as well: if you are going to be storing large amounts of data with potential whitespace or other meddlesome characters in it, be sure to always quote the variable ("$result" instead of $result) to ensure it gets treated as a single string.

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