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FWIW, more recent GNU grep releases (2.6 and later) run fine in UTF-8 mode.

Actually, why is SmartOS, "the Completely Modern Operating System", shipping with a five year old grep?

Minor correction: the "bug" in grep was fixed in GNU grep 2.7, not 2.6. I recall that because I wrote an article about it on my blog. See the release notes for GNU grep 2.7 here: http://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=6521

When the author shows the output of "which grep" it shows the path "/opt/local/bin/grep"; "/opt" is typically for additional installations of software. I haven't used SmartOS myself but my best guess is someone installed GNU grep manually and the PATH just included "/opt/local/bin" before "/usr/bin".

I guess SmartOS reserves /usr for the Solaris base install and puts additions in /opt/local. If you look at http://wiki.joyent.com/display/jpc2/SmartOS+Smartmachine+Dat... and click "to see list of installed software", it includes grep 2.5.3.

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