shell - How can I find encoding of a file via a script on Linux?

Question

I need to find the encoding of all files that are placed in a directory. Is there a way to find the encoding used?

The file command is not able to do this.

The encoding that is of interest to me is ISO?8859-1. If the encoding is anything else, I want to move the file to another directory.

Answer 1

It sounds like you're looking for enca. It can guess and even convert between encodings. Just look at the man page.

Or, failing that, use file -i (Linux) or file -I (OS?X). That will output MIME-type information for the file, which will also include the character-set encoding. I found a man-page for it, too :)