I will update this answer if you add more details about what exactly you need to do. On my system, using either terminator or gnome-terminal on a UTF-8 encoded Greek text file, I can use Perl to parse Greek:
$ cat test Με λένε Μαρία Με λένε Πόπη Με λένε Κίτσο $ file test test: UTF-8 Unicode text $ perl -ne 'print if /Πόπη/' test Με λένε Πόπη You can change the encoding of gnome-terminal like this:
Find and activate UTF-8. Then, you can change the encoding of your file using iconv:
iconv -f iso-8859-7 -t utf8 text.txt > new_text.txt