Find files containing multiple strings

Question

I use a command to recursively find files containing a certain string1:

find . -type f -exec grep -H string1 {} \\;

I need to

Answer 1

You can chain your actions and use the exit status of the first one to only execute the second one if the first one was successful. (Omitting the operator between primaries defaults to -and/-a.)

find . -type f -exec grep -q 'string1' {} \; -exec grep -H 'string2' {} \;

The first grep command uses -q, "quiet", which returns a successful exit status if the string was found.

Answer 2

you can also try this;

find . -type f -exec grep -l 'string1' {} \; | xargs grep -l 'string2'

this shows file names that contain string1 and string2

Answer 3

Answer

As you can see from the other answers on this page, there are several command-line tools that can be used to perform conjunctive searching across files. A fast and flexible solution that has not yet been posted is to use ag:

ag -l string1 | xargs ag -l string2

Useful variations

For case-insensitive searching, use the -i option of ag:

ag -il string1 | xargs ag -il string2

For additional search terms, extend the pipeline:

ag -l string1 | xargs ag -l string2 | xargs ag -l string3 | xargs ag -l string4

Answer 4

with GNU grep

grep -rlZ 'string1' | xargs -0 grep -l 'string2'

from man grep

-r, --recursive

Read all files under each directory, recursively, following symbolic links only if they are on the command line. Note that if no file operand is given, grep searches the working directory. This is equivalent to the -d recurse option.

-Z, --null Output a zero byte (the ASCII NUL character) instead of the character that normally follows a file name. For example, grep -lZ outputs a zero byte after each file name instead of the usual newline. This option makes the output unambiguous, even in the presence of file names containing unusual characters like newlines. This option can be used with commands like find -print0, perl -0, sort -z, and xargs -0 to process arbitrary file names, even those that contain newline characters.