Solaris Advanced User's Guide

Searching for Metacharacters

To use the grep command to search for metacharacters such as & ! . * ? and \, precede the metacharacter with a backslash (\). The backslash tells grep to ignore (escape) the metacharacter.

For example, the following expression matches lines that start with a period, and is useful when searching for nroff or troff formatting requests (which begin with a period).

$ grep ^\.

Table 4–1 lists common search pattern elements you can use with grep.

Table 4–1 grep Search Pattern Elements


Character	Matches
^	The beginning of a text line
$	The end of a text line
.	Any single character
[...]	Any single character in the bracketed list or range
[^...]	Any character not in the list or range
*	Zero or more occurrences of the preceding character or regular expression
.*	Zero or more occurrences of any single character
\	The escape of special meaning of next character

Note that you can also use these search characters in vi text editor searches.