Question

Is there a way to grep (or use another command) to find exact strings, using NO regex?

For example, if I want to search for (literally):

/some/file"that/has'lots\of"invalid"chars/and.triggers$(#2)[*~.old][3].html

I don’t want to go through and escape every single “escapable”. Essentially, I want to pass it through, like I would with echo:

$ echo "/some/file\"that/has'lots\of\"invalid\"chars/and.triggers$(#2)[*~.old][3].html"
/some/file"that/has'lots\of"invalid"chars/and.triggers$(#2)[*~.old][3].html

Answer 1

Use fgrep, it’s the same as grep -F (matches a fixed string).