Grep for literal strings

Pass -F to grep.

You can use grep for that, with the -F option.

-F, --fixed-strings       PATTERN is a set of newline-separated fixed strings

That's either fgrep or grep -F which will not do regular expressions. fgrep is identical to grep -F but I prefer to not have to worry about the arguments, being intrinsically lazy :-)

grep   ->  grep
fgrep  ->  grep -F  (fixed)
egrep  ->  grep -E  (extended)
rgrep  ->  grep -r  (recursive, on platforms that support it).