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I'd like to use grep with a PCRE expression that contains the < character. Bash thinks I want to redirect, but I don't want to. How can I escape <?

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I was able to do it with a backslash:

25 % grep \< xmospos.c
#include        <stdio.h>
#include        <stdlib.h>
#include        <getopt.h>
#include        <X11/Xlib.h>

A quoted less-than, and a quoted, backslashed less than both gave goofy answers.

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  • 5
    Yes, or put it in single quotes – glenn jackman Jul 26 '11 at 1:51
  • I still need to learn, e.g. how that exactly works with escaping: grep -oP '(?< )(.*)$' does not work with single quotes for example. Tried it at first. – hakre Jul 26 '11 at 8:50
  • @hakre There seems to be a syntax error in your regexp. Did you mean (?<! )(.*)$ or (?<= )(.*)$? – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Jul 26 '11 at 22:18
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Two simple rules:

  • A backslash \C escapes the next character, whatever it is, other than a newline.
  • Single quotes 'text' escape any character between them, including a backslash, but not including a single quote (since it marks the end of the quoted text).

Thus:

grep -P '<html>' myfile
grep -P \<html\> myfile
grep -P '(?<!<)html' myfile
grep -P \(\?\<\!\<\) myfile

If you need to pass an argument that contains single quotes, you can use '\'' to “escape” a single quote inside single quotes. Technically, what this does is end the first literal text, then put a literal ' in the same word, then more literal text still in the same word.

grep '^D'\''oh!' myfile

The rest of the quoting rules (summarized):

  • You need to quote the following characters at least some of the times: whitespace and !"#$&'()*;<>?[\]^`{|}~ (in other words, the following characters are safe: letters, digits, %+,-./:=@_ and non-ASCII characters).
  • Between double quotes, all characters are used literally except "$\` and (in shells with history enabled) !. A backslash between double quotes will appear in the string unless it precedes one of the non-literal characters.

These rules are for bash and other Bourne-style shells (such as ash and ksh). They apply to zsh as well (except that = after whitespace may need quoting). The rules in csh/tcsh and in Fish are different.

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