Appending files on Mac is adding strange unprintable characters

Question

when I run a command like:

cat file1.js file2.js file3.js > all.js

On mac osx the all.js has strange characters prepended at the boundaries of the files.

The strange characters are the following values in hex editor:

EF BB BF

Anyone know what OS setting I need to change?

It seems the mac utilities are adding a Byte Order Mark at the beginning of the files. This is resulting in the browser, after it downloads the file, erroring with "invalid characters". What should I do? — JayPrime2012, Jan 25 '14 at 00:12

Hristo Iliev · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-25T00:17:46.953

0

EF BB BF is the UTF-8 representation of U+FEFF - the UTF BOM (Byte Order Mark). It is placed at the beginning of the file by some editors and its purpose is to identify whether the originator system was little endian or big endian. This is redundant as UTF-8 uses fixed byte ordering and therefore the BOM only signals the beginning of UTF-8-endcoded text. Check your editor's settings and tell it not to write BOMs.

edited Jan 25 '14 at 00:17

answered Jan 25 '14 at 00:12

Hristo Iliev

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I'm using WebStorm on Mac OSX. I still haven't figured out how to remove the BOM. – JayPrime2012 Jan 25 '14 at 00:19
This [link](http://devnet.jetbrains.com/message/5472315?tstart=0) could probably help. – Hristo Iliev Jan 25 '14 at 00:21
For each file, I went to file menu, and there is an option "remove BOM". Better would be able to do this for each file in the project. Someone should tell us how :) – JayPrime2012 Jan 25 '14 at 00:23

Appending files on Mac is adding strange unprintable characters

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