Grepping for '../' (dot dot slash)

Question

I'm trying to search my directory for files that contain ../ with grep -r -n '../' *, but I get lots of false positives. grep is interpreting the period as a wild character, how do I stop this?

Answer 1

Just escape the dots:

grep -r -n '\.\./' *

Tested in Cygwin. Dot is of course a wildcard in regular expressions.

Answer 2

Escape the dots with backslashes: \.