Back in the old days I thought that any pattern that was including in single-quotes with the Unix grep command meant that the pattern inside the string was completely ignored by grep. But these days I have to escape special characters with a backslash character, which is really annoying. This example shows what I mean:
$ grep '\[NOTE\]' *adoc 01-D-intro.adoc:[NOTE] 10-D-eclipse.adoc:[NOTE] 14-D-assembly.adoc:[NOTE]
In that example I’m searching Asciidoc files for the pattern [NOTE], but I have to use backslash characters before the two bracket characters to get my pattern to work. I finally got tired of doing that and looked at the man page for grep, and it turns out that you can use its -F option to ignore special characters that are in between the quotes, like this:
$ grep -F '[NOTE]' *adoc 01-D-intro.adoc:[NOTE] 10-D-eclipse.adoc:[NOTE] 14-D-assembly.adoc:[NOTE]
That’s a much better solution. Here’s what the grep man page says about this option:
-F, --fixed-strings
Interpret pattern as a set of fixed strings
(i.e. force grep to behave as fgrep).
That’s actually not terribly helpful, but I thought I’d include it here for completeness. :)
Speaking of completeness, you can also use grep’s -n argument to show matching line numbers:
$ grep -Fn '[NOTE]' *adoc 01-D-intro.adoc:45:[NOTE] 10-D-eclipse.adoc:31:[NOTE] 14-D-assembly.adoc:113:[NOTE]
In summary, if you wanted to see how to configure grep so it will ignore special characters inside of quotes, I hope this solution is helpful.
