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regexlinuxgrep

Grep for specific code block

I have this phantom block of code that is messing up my program, but I can simply NOT find where it is in my project. I know exactly (to the whitespace) what the code would be, but since it is code it has a lot of spaces, periods, brackets, ect. It would be a huge pain to type out a regular expression for the whole thing. Is there a way I could just search for an exact match to a string using grep -r?

Solution

  • fgrep does this (or grep -F). Don't forget to quote the pattern to prevent the shell from interpreting it:

    $ echo 'a' | grep '[abc]'
a
$ echo 'a' | fgrep '[abc]'
$ echo '[abc]' | fgrep '[abc]'
[abc]