first set your locale to something unicode based: export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
then try the simple script (from Ulrich Müller): $ cat test.sh shopt -s extglob text="aaaäöü" echo "${text} ${text//?aa} ${text//\aaa}" with bash-4.1_p2, i get: aaaäöü äöü äöü but with bash-4.2_p8 ... 4.2_p24 (just what i have locally): aaaäöü aaaäöü aaaäöü seems like a bug to me -mike
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