i am writing a program that will search for a pattern in all the file in a particular directory and replace the pattern with a given pattern.
but the problem is this pattern i am searching may contain special characters like $,#,&,* etc.
but when the user is entering the pattern i dont want her to give the trouble of writing a backslash everytime he writes a special character. how can i modify my program so that i can trace the pattern with or without special characters without writing ' \' before every special character?

If you don't need to worry about metacharacters at all, try "fgrep" (or grep -F on some systems) - this is "fixed" grep which greps for fixed strings.

Then
fgrep 'string$with&special*chars' file

would work and match the literal characters

EDIT: Please read the rules - duplicate and cross posting is not permitted. I have deleted the duplicate post from the Unix for Dummies forum. If somebody can provide an answer (as I have) - they will give it - duplicating posts does not safeguard a prompt response!

Cheers
ZB