I first learned about textutil in Mac OS X 10.4 in a tip here on macosxhints.com.
textutil is a rosetta stone for converting between different text file formats. For example, I recently wanted to change 36,000 .doc files into text files. So I needed to come up with a way of recursively converting all the files. The unix find command can be used to feed textutil. In Terminal, navigate to the appropriate directory (since this uses the current "." directory), and enter this command:
find . -name *.doc -exec textutil -convert txt '{}' \;
Read aloud: Find recursively in the current directory, by name, all the doc files. Execute the textutil 'convert to text' command with the found files. Bingo, done.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060309220909384