need way to to force "search files" and m-x grep to treat regexp patterns as strings.

[gb]

ticket:419 requested a means of doing regular-expression based searches in the "search files" dialog; since "search files" uses grep, that means already exists, but it'd be good to have a way of treating the search string as a literal string and not as a search pattern, e.g., to interpret "*foo*" as "the name of a special variable", not "whatever matches the regexp "*foo*".

[gz]

I'm closing this because Search Files provides this option (and m-x grep should be changed to use Search Files dialog as per ticket:1166)