Using grep to search for a string that has a dot in it

grep uses regexes; . means “any character” in a regex. If you want a literal string, use grep -F, fgrep, or escape the . to \..

Don’t forget to wrap your string in double quotes. Or else you should use \\.

So, your command would need to be:

grep -r "0\.49" *

or

grep -r 0\\.49 *

or

grep -Fr 0.49 *