Batch convert files to UTF-8

In my daily job as DBA I need to convert a lot of files from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8. This files are commonly SQL scripts generated on Windows environments and I have to execute them in linux servers (Red Hat or Ubuntu) against UTF-8 databases.These scripts usually have characters in Spanish and Catalan (tildes, ñ, ç, etc.) and I need to convert to UTF-8 to avoid getting errors due to invalid characters.

I’ve tried with iconv, specifying as output file the same name as the input file:

$ iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t utf-8 file.sql -o file.sql

but if the file is greater than 32KB I get this:

Bus error

To avoid this I’ve created a script (2utf8.sh):

#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -lt 1 ]
then
  echo "Use: "$0" <file_name>"
  echo "Convert files from ISO-8859-1 to UTF8"
  exit
fi

for i in $*
do
  if [ ! -f $i ]; then # Only convert text files
    continue
  fi
  # Generate temp file to avoid Bus error
  iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t utf-8 $i -o $i.tmp
  mv $i.tmp $i
done

You just have to run it with the name of the file to convert, or using wildcards:

$ 2utf8.sh *.sql

Hope this help you!