I know what you are thinking: »Those poor OS X users with their mutilated unix user land. I wrote about the ancient version of locate that OS X ships with, now this also applies to the standard shell, bash. OS X ships with version GNU bash, version 2.05b.0(1)-release, which just like locate has poor or non UTF-8 support. If you start typing characters like ä, ü or ö you get everything but that. You can’t search for them and so on. Seriously, this is so weak but again, you can help yourself with MacPorts. I found this article on the web, describing the steps nessecary for enabling UTF-8 in Terminal.app, iTerm and X11 Term. For the sake of redundant information storage I’ll give you the management summary for Terminal.app.

1. Use MacPorts to install the latest version of bash: sudo port -c install bash (-c is for autoclean mode)
2. Edit /etc/shells and add the path to the new version of bash which is /opt/local/bin/bash
3. Edit ~/.profile and add the following lines:
   export LC_ALL=de_DE.UTF-8
export LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
   This adds support for german utf-8 characters. Use locale -a to find your favorite language code.
4. Run chsh and change the path of the shell to /opt/local/bin/bash
5. Open the window settings, select Display and make sure the drop-down at the bottom is set to UTF-8 and make sure Wide Glyphs are enabled too. Then click the »Use Settings as default« button.
6. Restart Terminal.app – Tada.wav
7. If it doesn’t work open the Terminal.app preferences and see if you manually set the shell path, if so change it to to /opt/local/bin or switch back to the default login shell

Now if you want to have UTF-8 support in locate and all the other tools as well, you have to read my previous post about findutils and coreutils.

Afterwards you are able to do things like this and feel less handicapped.

:~ $ touch äüö
:~ $ ls äüö
äüö
:~ $ rm äüö
:~ $

Personally, I think the Mac OS X unix userland is rotten. There are apple tools mixed with some current unix tools and there are outdated unix tools like locate. Maybe you didn’t even notice that but locate for example doesn’t even know the -i option for case insensitive lookups in the locate.datbase. As usual, you can help yourself with MacPorts. Simply install the GNU coreutils and findutils. For convenience provide the +with_default_names option. If you don’t add this option you get glocate instead of locate and so on. Now the new locate can’t find anything unless you run updatedb from /opt/local/bin/updatedb. After that everything should be fine. Checkout what tools are included in coreutils and findutils by clicking on the equivalent hyperlinks. This resolves the weird behavior of tools on OS X that you might expect to work like on your FreeBSD or Linux machines.

Install coreutils (the -c option is equivalent to sudo port clean portname):

sudo port -c install coreutils +with_default_names
sudo port -c install findutils +with_default_names

Locate before the installation:

man locate
LOCATE(1) BSD General Commands Manual LOCATE(1)

DESCRIPTION…

and afterwards:

LOCATE(1) LOCATE(1)

DESCRIPTION…

I think you get the idea.