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?
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Zambezi
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for searching source codes I would use ag (silver searcher) – Kent Aug 12 '14 at 14:14
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possible duplicate of [Grep for literal strings](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3242873/grep-for-literal-strings) – tripleee Aug 12 '14 at 14:17
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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]
Fred Foo
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If it is a multiline pattern, pcregrep -F can be useful (-F for with fixed string).
martin
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