Can I disable regex in grep? 1

[cpjust]

Hi,
I'm wondering if there is any kind of switch to disable regex in grep? I couldn't see anything obvious in the man page.

I'm writing a script that greps for a certain string in a file and if it's not there, it adds it; but the string contains asterisks which grep considers wild cards. So right now I need to set 2 variables to the same string, except one has the * chars escaped so grep doesn't think of them as wildcards.

For simplicity & maintainability it would be nice if I could just use the same variable in the grep as I do when appending the string to the file.

 

[feherke]

Hi

-F, --fixed-strings
Interpret PATTERN as a list of fixed strings, separated by newlines, any of which is to be matched. (-F is specified by POSIX.)

Certainly works with GNU [tt]grep[/tt].

Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/

 

[feherke]

Hi

Ah, forgot it. Or on old systems use [tt]fgrep[/tt]. ( Which this days is considered deprecated and is just the same as [tt]grep -F[/tt]. )

Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/