How can I remove the BOM from a UTF-8 file?

Question

I have a file in UTF-8 encoding with BOM and want to remove the BOM. Are there any linux command-line tools to remove the BOM from the file?

$ file test.xml
         


        

Answer 1

Well, just dealt with this today and my preferred way was dos2unix:

dos2unix will remove BOM and also take care of other idiosyncrasies from other SOs:

$ sudo apt install dos2unix
$ dos2unix test.xml

It's also possible to remove BOM only (-r, --remove-bom):

$ dos2unix -r test.xml

Note: tested with dos2unix 7.3.4