Linux and Unix Shell Programming

7.5. Escaping the meaning of a special character using \

We may want to search for strings or characters they may sometimes contain a character that is considered a special character. What is a special character? For general purposes you may consider any of the following characters to be special characters

$.' " * [ ] ^ | () \ + ? 

Suppose we wanted to match any lines that had a period ‘ . ’ in them. We know a ‘ . ’ is a special character that lets you match any single character, so we need to disable this meaning. Here’s how we would do it:

\. 

The above says do not treat the character after the backslash as a special character, but treat it literally; in this case, treat it as a period.

Suppose we want to match any lines containing a caret ...