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

IF you are certain that a given file starts with a BOM, then it is possible to remove the BOM from a file with the tail command:

tail --bytes=+4 withBOM.txt > withoutBOM.txt