You can use the fgrep command to search a file for a literal string or a group of characters. The fgrep command reads all regular expression characters literally. Regular expression metacharacters have no special meaning to the fgrep command, for example a ? character, is interpreted as a question mark, and a $ character is interpreted as a dollar sign.
The syntaxfor the fgrep command is:
fgrep options string filenames
To search for all lines in the file containing a literal asterisk (*) character, perform the command:
$ fgrep '*' /etc/system *ident "@(#)system 1.18 97/06/27 SMI" /* SVR4 1.5 */ * * SYSTEM SPECIFICATION FILE * * moddir: * * Set the search path for modules. This has a format similar to the * csh path variable. If the module isn't found in the first directory * it tries the second and so on. The default is /kernel /usr/kernel ... (output truncated)