Here's what I use to grep the Unicode character database. It definitely makes some unwarranted assumptions about the structure of the library, but hey, it works for me...

#!/usr/bin/perl -C
 
binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";
$pat = "@ARGV";
if (ord $pat > 256) {
    $pat = sprintf("%04x", ord $pat);
}
elsif (ord $pat > 128) {        # arg in sneaky UTF-8
    $pat = sprintf("%04x", unpack("U0U",$pat));
}
 
@names = split /^/, do 'unicore/Name.pl';
for (@names) {
    if (/$pat/io) {
        $hex = hex($_);
        print chr($hex),"\t",$_;
    }
}
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I call it "uni", by the way.