grep -P is not supported on Ubuntu

On Ubuntu, the man page of grep states that the flag -P or --perl-regexp can be used to use a PERL regular expression. But when the command is run with either flags you get the following error message:
grep: The -P option is not supported
This has officially been a bug for a while; it appears to be a hot issue. Some folks have even suggested "fixing it" by removing -P from the man page. More details can be found here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grep/+bug/15051

Regardless of all that chatter, I found a pretty easy solution that works. You can copy the grep executables and libraries from a machine that has a Red Hat distribution installed. Just SCP the files over and you're ready to go:
mv /bin/grep /bin/grep.bak
scp user@192.168.1.1:/bin/grep /bin/grep
scp user@192.168.1.1:/lib/libpcre.so.0.0.1 /lib
cd /lib
ln -s libpcre.so.0.0.1 libpcre.so.0