Hi there

This is a simpler application of the idea I mentioned in my previous post. It uses the fact that $0 is the name of the command issued. Save this as "f8t16" in a folder in your path:

Code:
#!/bin/bash
name=$(basename $0) # extract just the name from the absolute name
to=${name#*t} # get rid of everything up to and including the first "t"
from=${name#f} # get rid of the first "f"
from=${from%t*} # and then everything after (and including) the first "t"
iconv -f utf${from} -t utf${to} "$*" # finally issue the iconv with the proper flags to the arguments
Then make a link (soft or hard, both work, but not an alias) to this file with the numbers you want to convert to and fro. A couple of examples:

Code:
pabloa$ ln f8t16 f16t8
pabloa$ ln f16t8 f16bet16le # from utf16 big endian to utf16 little endian
The idea can be exploited for other kinds of encoding, but that is left as an exercise to the reader.

Cheers.
P.