Linux file system with column to show file encodings?

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Linux file system with column to show file encodings?

JAB Creations

2:28 pm on Aug 1, 2010 (gmt 0)

I keep finding files being converted to encodings other then Unicode however XP's Windows Explorer does not have a detail column for showing the encoding of files in a directory. For those who are not sure what I'm talking about open a folder on XP (I do not use Vista or 7 and 90% of what I use in XP was removed in Vista and 95% removed in 7), click the view menu at the top, and then choose 'details' if it's not already set. In the details view of a folder if you right-click on the columns (Name, size, type, date modified in example) you can customize the columns however there are no columns for viewing the file encoding the files were saved as.

I'm wondering if there is a program (not the console/terminal) in Linux regardless of distro that would allow me to quickly/visually scan my directories for non-unicode code/text files?

- John

lammert

4:23 am on Aug 2, 2010 (gmt 0)

The encoding type of a text file is sometimes indicated with the Byte order Mark at the beginning of the file. If this BOM is present, it is a Unicode file, otherwise the encoding type is not known. The BOM is not always present in Unicode encoded files (it is added by some editors but not by others) and therefore adequate encoding determination may not be possible in all situations.

A Linux type non-Unicode file search utility could consist of a routine which opens each file and checks those first file bytes. Don't know of a utility which does this out of the box though.

phranque

6:20 am on Aug 2, 2010 (gmt 0)

you might be able to do something with the enca [freshmeat.net] utility.
here is the enca Linux man page [linux.die.net].