Question

I have this script that works with iconv to automatically convert the encoding of a group of files in a directory to UTF-8 and it changes the original files extention to .old but I want to know how to alter the script to make it look and convert all files in a directory AND all files in all subdirectories.

terminal code:

sudo convert/dir_iconv.sh convert/books cp1251 utf8

dir_iconv.sh script

#!/bin/bash

ICONVBIN='/usr/bin/iconv' # path to iconv binary

if [ $# -lt 3 ]
then
echo "$0 dir from_charset to_charset"
exit
fi

for f in $1/*
do
if test -f $f
then
echo -e "\nConverting $f"
/bin/mv $f $f.old
$ICONVBIN -f $2 -t $3 $f.old > $f
else
echo -e "\nSkipping $f - not a regular file";
fi
done

Answer 1

Instead of for f in $1/* try using something like for f in $(find $1 -type f). Additionally, the -type f option on the find command will skip non-file objects for you so the test and conditional logic are not necessary.

[edit]

For example this may work, totally untested (cleaned up the formatting a bit too) :

#!/bin/bash

ICONVBIN='/usr/bin/iconv' # path to iconv binary

if [[ $# -lt 3 ]]; then
    echo "$0 dir from_charset to_charset"
    exit
fi

for f in $(find $1 -type f); do
    echo "Converting $f"
    /bin/mv $f $f.old
    $ICONVBIN -f $2 -t $3 $f.old > $f
done