How to find patterns across multiple lines using grep?

Question

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 bl         


        

Answer 1

You can do that very easily if you can use Perl.

perl -ne 'if (/abc/) { $abc = 1; next }; print "Found in $ARGV\n" if ($abc && /efg/); }' yourfilename.txt

You can do that with a single regular expression too, but that involves taking the entire contents of the file into a single string, which might end up taking up too much memory with large files. For completeness, here is that method:

perl -e '@lines = <>; $content = join("", @lines); print "Found in $ARGV\n" if ($content =~ /abc.*efg/s);' yourfilename.txt