How do you grep for a string containing a slash?

Question

How should I grep for a string containing a forward slash like ./.?

Answer 1

The forward slash is not a special character in grep, but may be in tools like sed, Ruby, or Perl. You probably want to escape your literal periods, though, and it does no harm to escape the slash. This should work in all cases:

\.\/\.

Answer 2

You'll just need to escape the periods with a backslash. So if I have a file foo.txt with contents:

./.
foo
bar
./.

I can run grep \./\. test.txt, which should just print the two ./. lines.