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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T16:30:09+00:00

I’m trying to find all text files which have the encoding iso-8859-1 and convert

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I’m trying to find all text files which have the encoding iso-8859-1 and convert these to UTF-8. My attempt so far is:

find . -name '*.txt' | xargs grep 'iso-8859-1' | cut -d ':' -f1 | 
xargs iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 {} > {}.converted

The (obvious) problem is that the last variable substitution won’t work, since {} occurs after the redirection, and doesn’t belong to xargs. As is I only get one file called {}.converted, not a.txt.converted, b.txt.converted etc. How can I make this work?

Note: I’m doing this on Cygwin, where iconv doesn’t seem to support -o.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you have GNU Parallel http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/ installed you can do this:

    find . -name '*.txt' | parallel grep -il iso-8859-1 | parallel iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 {} \> {}.converted

    You can install GNU Parallel simply by:

    wget http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/parallel.git/plain/src/parallel
chmod 755 parallel
cp parallel sem

    Watch the intro videos for GNU Parallel to learn more:
    https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL284C9FF2488BC6D1

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