Hi all,
I'm trying to FTP what looks like a simple .txt file from my Windows XP desktop to my UNIX server. I've tried using several programs to do this including UltraEdit and FTP Commander. I have tried sending it ascii, binary and even let the program decide. But every time it arrives in UNIX it includes a character that looks like a backwards question mark at the very beginning and it screws up my scripts meant to read the file.
Any suggestions on how to get rid of this darn thing? 
what's the byte count before and after? what's the first char look like under UltraEdit's hex mode? [ctrl-h]
The byte count is the same on both the desktop and UNIX. The first character under UltraEdit's hex mode is FF followed by FE
Appears to be a UTF-16 byte order mark:
Byte order mark - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
From another forum, one Unix utility to convert to UTF-8 (assuming your program cannot process UTF-16 encoded text) might be recode:
recode - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)
There is also this utility which may be useful:
iconv -f UTF-16 -t UTF-8 myfile > temporary_file
grep '1 CHAR UNICODE' temporary_file
I tried the iconv command and got the following error: iconv: can not initialize the conversion