For those dealing with Windows applications, sometimes the app writes logs with UTF-16 character encoding.  This is the case with Titan-FTP (commercial) software that writes the logs in that format.  Using cygwin or Linux grep command to search through the file will not return any result!  When using vi to examine the file, the escape characters doesn’t show up. The dos2unix command will not strip them, neither.

Fortunately, there is an easy way out. The utility iconv will help convert the file to make it searchable (read: Useful) again.

iconv -c -f utf-16 -t ascii file.log > newfile.log