How can I grep for a string that begins with a dash hyphen

Question

I want to grep for the string that starts with a dash hyphen  like -X  in a file  but it s confusing this as a command line argument    I ve tried   grep  -X  grep  -X grep  -X

User · Answer

I dont have access to a Solaris machine  but grep   -X  works for me on linux

User · Answer

Use   grep -- -X  Related  What does a bare double dash mean   thanks to nutty about natty

User · Answer

grep -e -X will do the trick

User · Answer

The dash is a special character in Bash as noted at http   tldp org LDP abs html special-chars html DASHREF  So escaping this once just gets you past Bash  but Grep still has it s own meaning to dashes  by providing options    So you really need to escape it twice  if you prefer not to use the other mentioned answers   The following will should work  grep   -X grep   -X  grep   -X    One way to try out how Bash passes arguments to a script program is to create a  sh script that just echos all the arguments  I use a script called echo-args sh to play with from time to time  all it contains is   echo      I invoke it as   bash echo-args sh  -X bash echo-args sh   -X bash echo-args sh   -X    You get the idea

User · Answer

grep -- -X grep   -X grep   -X  grep   -X  grep -e -X grep  - X

User · Answer

If you re using another utility that passes a single argument to grep  you can use     - X

User · Answer

grep   -X  file  It will grep and pick all the lines form the file     in the grep    indicates a line starting with

User · Answer

ls -l   grep   -    Hope this one would serve your purpose

User · Answer

The correct way would be to use  --  to stop processing arguments  as already mentioned  This is due to the usage of getopt long  GNU C-function from getopt h  in the source of the tool   This is why you notice the same phenomena on other command-line tools  since most of them are GNU tools  and use this call they exhibit the same behavior   As a side note - getopt long is what gives us the cool choice between -rlo and --really long option and the combination of arguments in the interpreter

User · Answer

you can use nawk    nawk   -X  print   file

[unix] How can I grep for a string that begins with a dash/hyphen?

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