Enclose the $ in square brackets [ .. ], that is, specify the special character as a character class. For example,
grep ‘[$]foo’ file.txt
Archive for the ‘grep FAQ’ Category
how do i grep on a term with a $ in it such as $foo? i tried enclosing it in quotes but that doesn’t help
Monday, February 16th, 2009if I wanted to match ‘foo13245’, can I use grep ‘foo[\d]*’?
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009Nope, \d has no meaning (unless using -P for PCRE). You need [[:digit:]] instead; i.e.,
grep 'foo[[:digit:]]*'
How can i search for files which contain string A but not string B ?
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009Pipe the output of grep through grep -v. For example:
grep 'A' file | grep -v 'B'
Why grep ‘foo|bar’ file doesn’t work?
Monday, January 5th, 2009The bar | has no special meaning in BRE (basic regular expressions). Use extended regular expressions (ERE) such as:
grep -E 'foo|bar' file
or
egrep 'foo|bar' file
In GNU grep, you can also force the spcial meaning of | by escaping it. E.g.,
grep 'foo\|bar' file
Is grep an acronym? Does it mean GNU Regular Expression P?
Sunday, January 4th, 2009grep originated from ed command: g/re/p where re is a regular expression, g stands for globally, and p stands for print. So one could say grep is an acronym of “Global Regular Expression Print“.