title: grep for special characters in Unix
body: <p>I have a log file (application.log) which might contain the following string of normal &amp; special characters on multiple lines:</p>
  
  <pre><code>*^%Q&amp;$*&amp;^@$&amp;*!^@$*&amp;^&amp;^*&amp;^&amp;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I want to search for the line number(s) which contains this special character string.</p>
  
  <pre class="lang-sh prettyprint-override"><code>grep '*^%Q&amp;$*&amp;^@$&amp;*!^@$*&amp;^&amp;^*&amp;^&amp;' application.log
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The above command doesn't return any results.</p>
  
  <p>What would be the correct syntax to get the line numbers?</p>