[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="joey"
 subject="""comment 1"""
 date="2021-12-31T15:37:27Z"
 content="""
Using grep -a would be fine, except people do use etckeeper on non-gnu systems
and I worry about breaking portability.

I guess the idea with setting `LC_CTYPE=C` is not to force this error
message to English, which would not be useful, but because whatever the
locale is set to is causing grep to interpret the input as binary. 

Except.. the C locale seems equally likely cause that as whatever
locale they are using? Indeed the one user who mentioned their locale
was using `de_DE.utf8` so why would setting C help at all?

grep is complaining about its stdin, which comes from running a find in
/etc, so there must be some particular file whose name causes grep to
behave this way. Apparently one that, in a unicode locale, grep thinks
is not unicode, but binary.

(Also, there was [[!commit 0dd5ff64bf4dba9a2e54c7f29c96998af5dcebce]]
which also involved setting LANG=C when using grep, in similarly hard to
understand circumstances.)
"""]]
