title: Grep regular expressions for single character
body: <p>I have a dictionary of words and I want to do a test to see if a generated words exists in the list so I'm using grep.  My problem is I cannot get grep to stop returning unwanted resposes.</p>
  
  <p>For example.  I want to grep the word menu and return only the exact match so I used:</p>
  
  <pre><code>grep -iw menu words.dat
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This returned both menu and menu's.  I've played around with regular expressions such as:</p>
  
  <pre><code>grep -ie '^menu.' words.dat
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This returns everything starting with menu and any number of characters after it.  Again, if I use the same command with -w, I still get menu and menu's.</p>
  
  <p>How can I restrict the grep command to do a wild card on one single character.</p>