Grep for literal strings

Question

I'm after a grep-type tool to search for purely literal strings. I'm looking for the occurrence of a line of a log file, as part of a line in a seperate log file. The search text can contain all sorts of regex special characters, e.g., []().*^$-\.

Is there a Unix search utility which would not use regex, but just search for literal occurrences of a string?

Answer 1

Pass -F to grep.

Answer 2

You can use grep for that, with the -F option.

-F, --fixed-strings       PATTERN is a set of newline-separated fixed strings

Answer 3

That's either fgrep or grep -F which will not do regular expressions. fgrep is identical to grep -F but I prefer to not have to worry about the arguments, being intrinsically lazy :-)

grep   ->  grep
fgrep  ->  grep -F  (fixed)
egrep  ->  grep -E  (extended)
rgrep  ->  grep -r  (recursive, on platforms that support it).

Answer 4

you can also use awk, as it has the ability to find fixed string, as well as programming capabilities, eg only

awk '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) if($i == "mystring") {print "do data manipulation here"} }' file