I'm having this one PHP project on my OSX which is in latin1 -encoding. Now I need to convert files to UTF8. I'm not much a shell coder and I tried something I found from internet: mkdir new for a in ls -R *; do iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 <"$a" new/"$a" ; done But that does not create the directory structure and it gives me heck load of errors when run. Can anyone come up with neat solution?