nkf

1. nkf stands for "New Kanji Filter" and is a command line tool used for character encoding and conversion.
2. It was developed by Jun-ichiro "itojun" Hagino in 1994 and is widely used in Unix-like operating systems.
3. nkf supports multiple character encodings including ASCII, UTF-8, ISO-2022-JP, Shift_JIS, EUC-JP, and more.
4. It can convert text files from one character encoding to another, making it useful for interoperability among different systems.
5. The tool can also detect the input encoding of a file and convert it to a desired target encoding.
6. nkf can be used to normalize Japanese text, convert full-width to half-width characters, apply MIME/Base64 encoding, and remove or add newline characters.
7. It supports batch processing, allowing users to convert multiple files at once.
8. The flexibility of nkf makes it valuable for web developers, system administrators, and anyone working with multilingual text.
9. The command line options of nkf enable users to specify the desired encoding, remove or preserve BOM (Byte Order Mark), and control newline conversion.
10. nkf is open source and licensed under the Perl Artistic License, which means it is free to use, modify, and distribute.