How to Use grep to find '../images/'

Question

How do you use grep to find occurrences of strings in a directory, when the string to search for is '../images/'? This is the command as I normally use it

grep -H -r 'string to find' /path/to/dir

Some search characters cause problems, and evidently '../' is among those.

I tried various combinatrions of \ in front of some characters This is a search I need to do frequently, to find references in css files that are pointing to images in the folder next door.

You could also use `fgrep`, if available on your platform, which does not treat "." as special characters. — bufh, Jul 31 '15 at 04:54

Patrick Maupin · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-31T04:35:30.833

3

The dot matches any character with grep. You need to prefix it with a backslash, e.g '\.\./images/'

edited Jul 31 '15 at 04:35

answered Jul 31 '15 at 04:33

Patrick Maupin

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I thought I tried that but I must not have. This worked perfect: grep -H -r '\.\.images/' Are the search rules for this the same as regex? – DanAllen Jul 31 '15 at 04:35
grep is the original regex -- yeah, just like that. – Patrick Maupin Jul 31 '15 at 04:35
Patrick, with that edit you just put up that is the answer. I have to wait a few minutes to accept. – DanAllen Jul 31 '15 at 04:37
Sorry -- I'm still sorta new to this. Thanks for the heads-up on that, I'll bear it in mind in the future! – Patrick Maupin Jul 31 '15 at 04:39

How to Use grep to find '../images/'

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