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I want to find files that have "abc" AND "efg" in that order, and those two strings are on different lines in that file. Eg: a file with content:
blah blah.. blah blah.. blah abc blah blah blah.. blah blah.. blah blah.. blah efg blah blah blah blah.. blah blah.. Should be matched.
789
If you want to find exact matches for multiple patterns, pass the -w flag to the grep command. As you can see, the results are different. The first command shows all lines with the strings you used. The second command shows how to grep exact matches for multiple strings.
Use the -A argument to grep to specify how many lines beyond the match to output. And use -B n to grep lines before the match. And -C in grep to add lines both above and below the match!
Grep is an awkward tool for this operation.
pcregrep which is found in most of the modern Linux systems can be used as
pcregrep -M 'abc.*(\n|.)*efg' test.txt where -M, --multiline allow patterns to match more than one line
There is a newer pcre2grep also. Both are provided by the PCRE project.
pcre2grep is available for Mac OS X via Mac Ports as part of port pcre2:
% sudo port install pcre2 and via Homebrew as:
% brew install pcre or for pcre2
% brew install pcre2 pcre2grep is also available on Linux (Ubuntu 18.04+)
$ sudo apt install pcre2-utils # PCRE2 $ sudo apt install pcregrep # Older PCRE If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
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