@wolf480pl Unix programs? Those are GNU's Not Unix programs sir.

UTF-16 is a useless format, as it's a multibyte encoding that almost doubles the storage size of text, unless all you are encoding is Chinese characters.

Just use UTF-8 - it's ASCII compatible and you can pass it to whatever program and it will work unless the program does something stupid.

If you have some UTF-16 encoded files, you can convert them to UTF-8 with GNU iconv.