A brute force decoder of Cyrillic strings with unknown charset combination.

decoder.sh

#!/bin/bash -e
S=$(head -1)
CHARSETS=(utf8 cp1251 cp1252 koi8r koi8u iso-8859-5 maccyrillic)
for c1 in ${CHARSETS[*]}; do
for c2 in ${CHARSETS[*]}; do
for c3 in ${CHARSETS[*]}; do
for c4 in ${CHARSETS[*]}; do
echo -ne "$c1\t$c2\t$c3\t$c4\t"
<<<$S iconv -f=$c1 -t=$c2 -c | iconv -f=$c3 -t=$c4 -c
done
done
done
done

./decoder.sh <file-with-weird-characters.txt | less