www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/recode/recode_7.html

search

	Buy GNU books!

The recode reference manual

3.1 Synopsis of recode call

The general format of the program call is one of:

recode [option]... [charset | request [file]... ]

Some calls are used only to obtain lists produced by recode itself, without actually recoding any file. They are recognised through the usage of listing options, and these options decide what meaning should be given to an optional charset parameter. See section 3.3 Asking for various lists.

In other calls, the first parameter (request) always explains which transformations are expected on the files. There are many variations to the aspect of this parameter. We will discuss more complex situations later (see section 3.2 The request parameter), but for many simple cases, this parameter merely looks like this(2):

before..after

where before and after each gives the name of a charset. Each file will be read assuming it is coded with charset before, it will be recoded over itself so to use the charset after. If there is no file on the recode command, the program rather acts as a Unix filter and transforms standard input onto standard output.

The capability of recoding many files at once is very convenient. For example, one could easily prepare a distribution from Latin-1 to MSDOS, this way:

mkdir package cp -p Makefile *.[ch] package recode Latin-1..MSDOS package/* zoo ah package.zoo package/* rm -rf package

(In this example, the non-mandatory `-p' option to cp is for preserving timestamps, and the zoo program is an archiver from Rahul Dhesi which once was quite popular.)

The filter operation is especially useful when the input files should not be altered. Let us make an example to illustrate this point. Suppose that someone has a file named `datum.txt', which is almost a TeX file, except that diacriticised characters are written using Latin-1. To complete the recoding of the diacriticised characters only and produce a file `datum.tex', without destroying the original, one could do:

cp -p datum.txt datum.tex recode -d l1..tex datum.tex

However, using recode as a filter will achieve the same goal more neatly:

recode -d l1..tex <datum.txt >datum.tex

This example also shows that l1 could be used instead of Latin-1; charset names often have such aliases.