How to grep asterisk without escaping?

Question

Suppose I have a file abc.txt which contains line ab*cd. When I grep that pattern ab*cd with quotes but without escaping

Answer 1

first of all, you should keep in mind: regex =/= glob

* has special meaning in regex. You have to escape it to match it literally. without escaping the *, grep tries to match ab+(any number of b)+c

for example:

abbbbbbbbbbbbc