Why is my Bash script adding to the beginning of files?

Question

I\'ve written a script that cleans up .csv files, removing some bad commas and bad quotes (bad, means they break an in house program we use to transform these files) using sed:

Answer 1

To get rid of these in GNU emacs:

1. Open Emacs
2. Do a find-file-literally to open the file
3. Edit off the leading three bytes
4. Save the file

There is also a way to convert files with DOS line termination convention to Unix line termination convention.

Answer 2

U+FEFF is the code point for a byte order mark. Your files most likely contain data saved in UTF-16 and the BOM has been corrupted by your 'cleaning process' which is most likely expecting ASCII. It's probably not a good idea to remove the BOM, but instead to fix your scripts to not corrupt it in the first place.