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

I released a grep alternative a few days ago that does support this directly, either via multiline matching or using conditions - hopefully it is useful for some people searching here. This is what the commands for the example would look like:

Multiline:

sift -lm 'abc.*efg' testfile

Conditions:

sift -l 'abc' testfile --followed-by 'efg'

You could also specify that 'efg' has to follow 'abc' within a certain number of lines:

sift -l 'abc' testfile --followed-within 5:'efg'

You can find more information on sift-tool.org.