For debugging purposes, I need to recursively search a directory for all files which start with a UTF-8 byte order mark (BOM). My current solution is a simple shell script: find -type f | while read file do if [ "`head -c 3 -- "$file"`" == $'\xef\xbb\xbf' ] then echo "found BOM in: $file" fi done Or, if you prefer short, unreadable one-liners: find -type f|while read file;do [ "`head -c3 -- "$file"`" == $'\xef\xbb\xbf' ] && echo "found BOM in: $file";done It doesn't work with filenames that contain a line break, but such files are not to be expected anyway. Is there any shorter or more elegant solution? Are there any interesting text editors or macros for text editors?