Converting a UTF-8 address list to plain ASCII fails as soon as iconv meets a character such as e-acute. You want those characters approximated by similar ASCII ones, for example e, rather than dropped or fatal. Which command does that?
LPIC-1 Exam 102-500, objective 107. Administrative tasks hard
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Treat it as a good draft rather than as settled fact, and read the source below before you rely on it. It is not used in mock exams here — only questions a person has signed for are.
How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
The options
Correct iconv -f UTF-8 -t ASCII//TRANSLIT list.txt
Correct. The //TRANSLIT suffix on the target encoding asks iconv to transliterate characters that the target cannot represent into similar ones it can.
Not correct iconv -f UTF-8 -t ASCII//IGNORE list.txt
Wrong for the requirement. //IGNORE silently discards the characters that cannot be represented, so the accented letters vanish from the output entirely.
Not correct iconv -c -f UTF-8 -t ASCII list.txt
Wrong for the requirement. -c omits input characters that are invalid in the source encoding. It suppresses the error but again loses the characters rather than approximating them.
Not correct iconv -f ASCII -t UTF-8//TRANSLIT list.txt
Wrong, and backwards. It declares the UTF-8 input to be ASCII, so conversion fails on the first non-ASCII byte, and //TRANSLIT is pointless because UTF-8 can represent everything.
Why
iconv's target encoding may carry a suffix: //TRANSLIT approximates unrepresentable characters, //IGNORE drops them, and with neither, iconv stops with an error at the first one. The transliteration table comes from the locale, so the result depends on the locale in effect when the command runs. Without -o the converted text goes to standard output.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page iconv(1)
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 107 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
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