On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 5:37 PM, Carsten Bormann <cabo@xxxxxxx> wrote: > A *pollution-intolerant* tool is one that can do UTF-8, but reacts adversely to UTF-8 with BOMs. Many tools that look for text signatures to do some form of file type detection are foiled by BOMs. A recent example I happen to remember is Mark Thomson’s I-D template code; this tries to recognize two different variants of markdown by looking at the first three characters and fails if those include a BOM. Since I was invoked, I've fixed it. BTW, markdown != text, so I think that we're entitled to be intolerant of crap on input; indeed your own tool was intolerant until I reported the bug. Having to fix every single tool in existence is a nuisance. I want to be able to read character[0] and get a character. In this case it was cut(1) passing the problem down to the next fool (me), but grep with '^---' would have failed too.