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

If you are willing to use contexts, this could be achieved by typing

grep -A 500 abc test.txt | grep -B 500 efg

This will display everything between "abc" and "efg", as long as they are within 500 lines of each other.