skacurt/unbom

Mass remove UTF-8 BOM markers from text files

unbom

Tool to remove UTF-8 BOM markers from files.

why

UTF-8 BOMs are problematic and useless in common cases. A lot of tools don't support BOM markers; command-line diff tools for instance. Tools that support UTF-8, support it without markers anyway. They serve no purpose other than making our diff outputs annoying.

Visual Studio defaults to UTF-8+BOM causing the problems.

There are many shell scripts available for removing BOM markers. Many of them either slow or buggy. They assume BOM marker can appear inside a file. A careless user can easily corrupt their files. I just wanted a simple and safer tool so I spent an hour on this.

install

Install unbom by running the command:

dotnet tool install --global unbom

usage

Usage: unbom [options] <filespec>

Options:
    -r, --recurse              recurse subdirectories
    -n, --nobackup             do not save a backup file

example

unbom -r *.cs

Remove UTF-8 BOM markers from all files with ".cs" extensions and subdirectories. Saves old versions of files in "filename.bak" file.

license

MIT License. See LICENSE! file for details.