unix - Grep for literal strings

Question

I'm after a grep-type tool to search for purely literal strings. I'm looking for the occurrence of a line of a log file, as part of a line in a seperate log file. The search text can contain all sorts of regex special characters, e.g., []().*^$-.

Is there a Unix search utility which would not use regex, but just search for literal occurrences of a string?

Answer 1

You can use grep for that, with the -F option.

-F, --fixed-strings       PATTERN is a set of newline-separated fixed strings