Replacing “#”, “$”, “%”, “&”, and “_” with “\#”, “\$”, “\%”, “\&”, and “\_”

Question

I have a plain text document, which I want to compile inside LaTeX. However, sometimes it has the characters, \"#\", \"$\", \"%\", \"&\", and \"_\". To compile properly

Answer 1

I think your problem is that bash itself is handling those escapes.

1. What you have looks right to me. But warning: it will also doubly escape e.g. a \# that is already escaped. If that's not what you want, you might want to modify your patterns to check that there isn't a preceding \ already.
2. $ is used for bash command substitution syntax. I guess grep "\\$" file.txt should do what you expect.