locales problem / grep question

[Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca>]

hi everyone,

In an earlier threasd (which since moved on in a different direction)
I mentioned this error I've been getting when I try to run some
programs, most pressingly emacs:

>-----------
>matt@anarres:~$ emacs .muttrc
>No fonts match `-*-*-medium-r-normal--14-*-*-*-c-*-iso8859-15'
>-----------

if I run emacs -nw, the error doesn't occur, so I asusme the issue is
x-specific.  Anyway, though people were sympathetic, no one seemed to
have seen this specific problem before (if it's familiar, help would
still be absolutely welcome!)...  it's been bugging me on and off, and
today I tried to use grep to look for this string somewhere in some
file on the system.  

now obviously the following doesn't work: 
grep -r -*-*-medium-r-normal--14-*-*-*-c-*-iso8859-15 /
(*'s need to be escaped)

slightly less obviously, neither does this:
grep -r -\*-\*-medium-r-normal--14-\*-\*-\*-c-\*-iso8859 / 
(grep looks for a switch after the '-')

and neither did this, which I tried more or less at random: 
grep -r \-\*-\*-medium-r-normal--14-\*-\*-\*-c-\*-iso8859 /

now, I've worked around the problem by using this:
grep -r medium-r-normal.*iso8559 /

(which is running right now, and will probably take a while!) but I'm
curious: what's the CORRECT way to search for a string like this,
since I'm not interested in the dozens of files that seem to contain
similar (but not identical) expressions?  

thanks,
matt