How to remove BOM from UTF-8?
Answer:
# awk '{if(NR==1)sub(/^\xef\xbb\xbf/,"");print}' text.txt
Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1068650/using-awk-to-remove-the-byte-order-mark
Updated: (Suggested by Van Overveldt Peter)
# tail --bytes=+4 text.txt
