How to remove symbol from file
Unicode files should have BOM, is the recommended and accepted way, specially for LE:


  In UTF-16, a BOM (U+FEFF) may be placed as the first character of a
  file or character stream to indicate the endianness (byte order) of
  all the 16-bit code units of the file or stream. If the 16-bit units
  are represented in big-endian byte order, this BOM character will
  appear in the sequence of bytes as 0xFE followed by 0xFF. This
  sequence appears as the ISO-8859-1 characters þÿ in a text display
  that expects the text to be ISO-8859-1.
  ...
  "The UTF-16 encoding scheme may or may not begin with a BOM. However, when there is no BOM, and in the absence of a higher-level protocol, the byte order of the UTF-16 encoding scheme is big-endian."


'linux' is a very generic term. You must be using some application for processing, and if the application is not recognizing the BOM it means is a bad application. Ditch it for something better.