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 do not respond for sed, the other answers are good enougth ;-)

You can use less as viewer to check your huge file (or more, but less is more comfortable than more).

For searching, you can use fgrep: it ignores regular expression => fgrep '\$' will really search for text \$. fgrep is the same as invoking grep -F.

EDIT: fgrep '\$' and fgrep "\$" are different. In the second case, bash interprets the string and will replace it by a single character: $ (i.e. fgrep will search for $ only).