title: Escaping metacharacters using grep on cygwin
body: <p>Using grep on cygwin to search for 'employee_id' with the following conditions:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Not preceeded by an underscore</li>
  <li>Immediately followed by either space, closed bracket, or period</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>The expression that follows works in Regex Builder 2.05 using a sample of text, but does not return results when used in grep as such:</p>
  
  <pre><code>grep -E -r '[^_]employee_id[ \]\.]' ./*
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm not sure if this is some peculiarity of entering expressions via command line, or if it has to do with differences between the many regex "dialects", but I haven't come across any alternative way of escaping characters in my search for an answer.</p>
  
  <p>Can someone provide the correct grep syntax to return the results I'm looking for?</p>