Match with grep when pattern contains hyphen "-"

I wrote the following command in order to match $a with $b, but when the value includes “-“, then I get an error. How can I avoid that?

# a="-Xmx5324m"
# b="-Xmx5324m"
#
#
#  echo "$a"  | grep -Fxc "$b"
grep: conflicting matchers specified

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Answers:

Method 1

Method 2

Answers:

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Method 1

Place -- before your pattern:

echo "$a"  | grep -Fxc -- "$b"

-- specifies end of command options for many commands/shell built-ins, after which the remaining arguments are treated as positional arguments.

Method 2

Besides of @sebasth’s great answer, you could tell that PATTERN with grep's -e option to use PATTERN as a pattern (here using the <<< zsh here-string operator instead of echo; see also printf '%sn' "$a" for portability).

grep -Fxc -e "$b" <<<"$a"

Or all beside of other options.

grep -Fxce "$b" <<<"$a"

Since your goal is byte-to-byte string equality comparison use the [ command instead.

if [ "$a" = "$b" ]

Or if $a contains $b, using the [[...]] ksh construct:

if [[ $a == *"$b"* ]]

Or more portably in all Bourne-like shells:

case $a in
  *"$b"*) ...
esac

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0

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