Word wrap a text file

Wrapping a text file to a fixed number of character is easy in Linux:


fold -w 80 -s input.txt > output.txt


Above -w 80 set the character limit to 80 which is standard. The flag -s tells to break lines at white space, not between words.

Convert text file to ASCII character encoding

It’s often needed to convert text between different character encodings, for example from UFT8 to conventional ASCII.
Linux systems come with command line tool iconv that does the job:


iconv -f utf8 -t ascii input.txt > output.txt


To see a list of all supported encodings do


iconv -l