sed with special characters

Question

I have this line that I want to use sed on:

--> ASD = $start ( *.cpp ) <--

where $start is not a varaiable, I want to use sed on it a

Answer 1

The chacters $,*,. are special for regular expressions, so they need to be escaped to be taken literally.

sed 's/ASD = \$start ( \*\.cpp )/ASD = \$dsadad ( .cpp )/' somefile