how to search for a file with pattern having white space in linux

Question

I am struggling hence need your help ( in linux ).

a) I have a file with two columns separated by a white space ( delimiter is " "). Infact, I run series of piped command on the command line which gives me output as mentioned above.

aaa bbb
ccc ddd
fff ggg
ccc nnn
fff kkk    # there are approx 20,000 such rows.

b) I have lot of others file such as file-1.txt, file-2. txt , file-3.txt.

Problem: I need to search for each line in the output mentioned in section a. above. To illustrate, I want to run equivalent of:

grep 'aaa bbb' file-1 txt file-2.txt file-3 txt 
grep 'ccc ddd' file-1 txt file-2.txt file-3 txt
......
20,000 times
.......

But above command takes hell lot of time.

Question:

How do I use a single series of command to perform this operation. Whenever I am running command ( as shown below), system only searches for individual words in the line i.e. for aaa and bbb separately and gives me wrong output.

eg:

cat < filename > | cut -d "," -f1,2 | xargs -I {} sed '{}' file-1.txt

or using grep instead of sed....

NOTE: command before pipe is bringing the output in space as mentioned in the point a. above.

Any help will be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Store all the patterns (aaa bbb etc.) to a file (patterns.txt), one per line, and then

grep -f patterns.txt file-*.txt

will do the job.