How to match double quotes using grep

Question

I thought I knew this(or at least how to google for it)!

But I can't figure out how to match double quotes using grep when searching for patterns in text file. I tried to escape the double quotes symbol with a backslash, but it doesn't seem to work.

>cat trial.txt  
"Bill" is here and "Ben" is there

> grep -iE "and \"ben\" is" trial.txt
Unmatched ".

How do I get this to work?

Fun fact, your code works for me with mingw bash 4.3.42 and grep 2.2. What version do you use? — Tamas Rev, Aug 17 '16 at 12:34
See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11995353/escape-double-quote-in-grep — Wiktor Stribiżew, Aug 17 '16 at 12:37

score 12 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 17 '16 at 12:28

12

Use single quotes to consider literal meaning of every character.

grep 'and "Ben" is' trial.txt

answered Aug 17 '16 at 12:28

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I was this close to trying it with single quotes - but decided instead to bother you nice folks over here at stackoverflow with my first question. It works perfectly with single quotes. Thanks! – Shamanth Huddar Aug 18 '16 at 04:52

How to match double quotes using grep

1 Answers1