How can I use Mac OS X (and UNIX) command line tools like grep with UTF-16 files?

Question

I have a bunch of text files I want to use with grep. They are all from an external source and are UTF-16 encoded and begin with a byte order mark.

Unix tools like grep don't work on them for me. What work-around is there for this?

Answer 1

Just use iconv(1) to change them to utf-8.