How can I re-add a unicode byte order marker in linux?

Question

I have a rather large SQL file which starts with the byte order marker of FFFE. I have split this file using the unicode aware linux split tool into 100,000 line chunks. But whe

Answer 1

To add BOMs to the all the files that start with "foo-", you can use sed. sed has an option to make a backup.

sed -i '1s/^\(\xff\xfe\)\?/\xff\xfe/' foo-*

straceing this shows sed creates a temp file with a name starting with "sed". If you know for sure there is no BOM already, you can simplify the command:

sed -i '1s/^/\xff\xfe/' foo-*

Make sure you need to set UTF-16, because i.e. UTF-8 is different.