Help!

I'm trying to output any paragraph instance in a text file that a * occurs,

i've used the command cat filename.txt |grep -p '*'

but as * is a wildcard it throws out every paragraph in the file, and not just the ones that contain a *



Is there anyway of getting round this i.e by using a char code instead...?

TIA

MD

Several lessons to be learnt here.

Firstly '*' is not a wildcard in this context, it is used to mean 'match 0 or many of the preceding character'. Thus:

a* would match a, aaaa or 'nothing'
aa* would match a, aaaa but would not match 'nothing'
[a-z]* would match a, zyxabc or 'nothing'

Secondly, why are you using cat? Grep will take a file as an argument so why cat it first?

grep "regex" yourFile

Finally (and the answer you are looking for), to escape the special meaning of a metacharacter (e.g. *-$), use the backslash '\\'

grep "\*" would match the '*' character
grep "\**" would match *, ******* and 'nothing'

Thanks Damian, I've learnt quite a bit from that