Yes. The search pattern I gave was just the one that works for vi. When you are passing the expression as an argument through a shell to grep (or some other utility) you have another level of quoting to worry about. With some shells you have to escape the backquote to avoid it being treated as the start of a command substitution inside a double quoted string. In other shells, that backslash wouldn't matter. With some shells, you might also have to escape the dollar sign. Note also that the "1" I marked in red above was a typo on my part. It won't hurt anything, but it isn't needed. I have also corrected it in my earlier message.