I basically want an exact match of the line I am grepping for, the special characters and spaces are giving me errors. Or is there another method I could use?
Congratulations, you're the proud recipient of a UUOC Award. Remember, whenever you write 'cat filename | command' you can almost almost always rewrite this in a simpler way as 'command < filename'.
I'm guessing(since you didn't say) that it's complaining about bad parameters. It thinks your string is a switch since it starts with -. If you want to tell grep that the following option is a parameter and not a switch, you can add -- before it.