Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Text file" in English language version.
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{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)Yes, UTF-8 can contain a BOM. However, it makes no difference as to the endianness of the byte stream. UTF-8 always has the same byte order. An initial BOM is only used as a signature — an indication that an otherwise unmarked text file is in UTF-8. Note that some recipients of UTF-8 encoded data do not expect a BOM. Where UTF-8 is used transparently in 8-bit environments, the use of a BOM will interfere with any protocol or file format that expects specific ASCII characters at the beginning, such as the use of "#!" of at the beginning of Unix shell scripts.
MS-DOS (unlike CP/M) knows the exact end of a file because it keeps a byte count in the directory, so one would expect no particular confusion in this regard. However, certain MS-DOS programs continue to use the CP/M convention of terminating a text file with a Control-Z character, and won't operate correctly unless this terminating byte is present. Therefore, you should be aware of a special SET EOF option for both incoming and outbound files, described later.