Batch convert EMF to SVG

I got ahold of a whole bunch of EMF files, a Microsoft specific image format, which can be used to describe vector graphics. In order to do something useful with these files, I needed to convert them to good ol' standard plain SVG. Inkscape is capable of opening an EMF file and then save it as a plain SVG.

I probably could have done the conversion manually in the GUI, one file at a time, in under an hour. But that would have been a very bad use of my time.

In the following days, I spent what amounts to far more than an hour searching for how to do a batch conversion. In the end, the answer was right under my nose, in the inkscape(1) manpage (version 0.92.5):

-l, --export-plain-svg=FILENAME

Export document(s) to plain SVG format, without sodipodi: or inkscape: namespaces and without RDF metadata. Use `-' as filename to write the image data to standard output.

$ for emf in ./*.emf; do \
      inkscape -z -f "${emf}" -l "${emf%.*}".svg; \
  done