‘<’ Match the empty string at the beginning of word.
‘>’ Match the empty string at the end of word.

/dev/sdb1       /media/fresh      ext2   defaults     0 0

egrep '</media/fresh>' /etc/fstab

egrep '[[:blank:]]/media/fresh[[:blank:]]' /etc/fstab

[[:alnum:]_]

Word-constituent characters are letters, digits, and the underscore.

grep -wo '/media/fresh' /etc/fstab

$ grep -wo '/media/fresh' <<< '/dev/sdb1       /media/fresh      ext2   defaults     0 0'
/media/fresh

egrep "(^|W)/media/fresh($|W)"