4.1.5 Searching for Metacharacters (OpenWindows Advanced User's Guide)

OpenWindows Advanced User's Guide

4.1.5 Searching for Metacharacters

Suppose you want to find lines in the text that have a dollar sign ($) in them. Preceding the dollar sign in the regular expression with a backslash (\) tells grep to ignore (escape) its special meaning. This is true for the other metacharacters (& ! . * ? and \ itself) as well.

For example, the expression

$ grep ^\.

matches lines starting with a period, and is especially useful when searching for nroff or troff formatting requests (which begin with a period).

The following table, Table 4-1, provides a list of the more commonly used 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
\	Escapes special meaning of next character

Note that these search characters can also be used in vi text editor searches.