-*- coding: utf-'8' "-*-" is not a valid encoding. Introduced by666387a274I think. It was probably a typo/replace gone bad and it got copy-pasted everywhere. Emacs complains every time you try to save changes to files with this invalid encoding. This changes all of them to coding: utf-8 adhering toeae045949d. Done with: find . -name '*.py' -print0 |\ xargs -0 sed -ie 's/-\*- coding: utf-'"'"'8'"'"' "-\*-"/coding: utf-8/'