.\" Copyright (c) Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org>
.\"
.\" This is free documentation; you can redistribute it and/or
.\" modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
.\" published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of
.\" the License, or (at your option) any later version.
.\"
.\" References consulted:
.\"   OpenGroup's Single Unix specification http://www.UNIX-systems.org/online.html
.\"   POSIX 2001 draft6
.\"
.TH ICONV 1  "January 13, 2002" "GNU" "Linux Programmer's Manual"
.SH NAME
iconv \- character set conversion
.SH SYNOPSIS
.nf
iconv [\fB-c\fP] [\fB-s\fP] [\fB-f\fP \fIencoding\fP] [\fB-t\fP \fIencoding\fP] [\fIinputfile\fP ...]
iconv \fB-l\fP
.fi
.SH DESCRIPTION
The \fBiconv\fP program converts text from one encoding to another encoding.
More precisely, it converts \fBfrom\fP the encoding given for the \fB-f\fP
option \fBto\fP the encoding given for the \fB-t\fP option. Either of these
encodings defaults to the encoding of the current locale. All the
\fIinputfile\fPs are read and converted in turn; if no \fIinputfile\fP is
given, the standard input is used. The converted text is printed to standard
output.
.PP
When option \fB-c\fP is given, characters that cannot be converted are
silently discarded, instead of leading to a conversion error.
.PP
When option \fB-s\fP is given, error messages about invalid or unconvertible
characters are omitted, but the actual converted text is unaffected.
.PP
The encodings permitted are system dependent. For the libiconv implementation,
they are listed in the iconv_open(3) manual page.
.PP
The \fBiconv -l\fP command lists the names of the supported encodings, in a
system dependent format. For the libiconv implementation, the names are
printed in upper case, separated by whitespace, and alias names of an encoding
are listed on the same line as the encoding itself.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.BR iconv_open "(3), " locale (7)