grep for multiple strings in file on different lines ie whole file not line based search

Question

I want to grep for files containing the words Dansk  Svenska or  Norsk on any line  with a usable returncode  as I really only like to have the info that the strings are contained  my one-liner goes a little further then this    I have many files with lines in them like this   Disc Title  unknown Title  01  Length  01 33 37 000 Chapters  33  Cells  31  Audio streams  04  Subpictures  20         Subtitle  01  Language  ar - Arabic  Content  Undefined  Stream id  0x20           Subtitle  02  Language  bg - Bulgarian  Content  Undefined  Stream id  0x21           Subtitle  03  Language  cs - Czech  Content  Undefined  Stream id  0x22           Subtitle  04  Language  da - Dansk  Content  Undefined  Stream id  0x23           Subtitle  05  Language  de - Deutsch  Content  Undefined  Stream id  0x24           Here is the pseudocode of what I want   for all files in directory   if file contains  Dansk  AND  Norsk  AND  Svenska  then  then echo the filename end   What is the best way to do this   Can it be done on one line

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If you only need two search terms  arguably the most readable approach is to run each search and intersect the results    comm -12  lt  grep -rl word1     sort   lt  grep -rl word2     sort

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Here s what worked well for me   find   -path     svn  -prune -o -type f -exec gawk   Dansk  a 1  Norsk  b 1  Svenska  c 1 END  if  a  amp  amp  b  amp  amp  c  print FILENAME            path to file1 sh   another path to file2 txt   blah foo php   If I just wanted to find  sh files with these three  then I could have used   find   -path     svn  -prune -o -type f -name    sh  -exec gawk   Dansk  a 1  Norsk  b 1  Svenska  c 1 END  if  a  amp  amp  b  amp  amp  c  print FILENAME            path to file1 sh

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If you have git installed  git grep -l --all-match --no-index -e Dansk -e Norsk -e Svenska   The --no-index searches files in the current directory that is not managed by Git  So this command will work in any directory irrespective of whether it is a git repository or not

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This is a blending of glenn jackman s and kurumi s answers which allows an arbitrary number of regexes instead of an arbitrary number of fixed words or a fixed set of regexes      usr bin awk -f   by Dennis Williamson - 2011-01-25  BEGIN       for  i ARGC-2  i gt  1  i--            patterns ARGV i     0          delete ARGV i                  for  p in patterns          if   0   p              matches p    1               print      the matching line could be printed    END       for  p in patterns            if  matches p     1              exit 1           Run it like this     multigrep awk Dansk Norsk Svenska  Language     - A  c  dvdfile dat

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Expanding on  kurumi s awk answer  here s a bash function   all word search         gawk           BEGIN               for  i ARGC-2  i gt  1  i--                    search terms ARGV i     0                  ARGV i    ARGV i 1                   delete ARGV i 1                                                 for  i 1 i lt  NF  i                     if   i in search terms                       search terms  1    1                   END               for  word in search terms                   if  search terms word     0                       exit 1                          return        Usage   if all word search Dansk Norsk Svenska filename  then     echo  all words found  else     echo  not all words found  fi

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You can use       grep -l Dansk     xargs grep -l Norsk   xargs grep -l Svenska   If you want also to find in hidden files   grep -l Dansk      xargs grep -l Norsk   xargs grep -l Svenska

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This searches multiple words in multiple files   egrep  abc xyz  file1 file2   filen

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I had this problem today  and all one-liners here failed to me because the files contained spaces in the names   This is what I came up with that worked   grep -ril  lt WORD1 gt    sed  s      amp       xargs grep -il  lt WORD2 gt

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You can do this really easily with ack   ack -l  cats    ack -xl  dogs     -l  return a list of files   -x  take the files from STDIN  the previous search  and only search those files   And you can just keep piping until you get just the files you want

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Yet another way using just bash and grep   For a single file  test txt       grep -q Dansk test txt    grep -q Norsk test txt    grep -l Svenska test txt   Will print test txt iff the file contains all three  in any combination   The first two greps don t print anything  -q  and the last only prints the file if the other two have passed   If you want to do it for every file in the directory       for f in    do grep -q Dansk  f    grep -q Norsk  f    grep -l Svenska  f  done

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grep    irl word1     grep    il word2  cat -    grep    il word3  cat -     -i makes search case insensitive -r makes file search recursive through folders -l pipes the list of files with the word found cat - causes the next grep to look through the files passed to it list

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awk   Dansk  a 1  Norsk  b 1  Svenska  c 1 END  if  a  amp  amp  b  amp  amp  c  print  0        you can then catch the return value with the shell  if you have Ruby 1 9    ruby -0777 -ne  print if  Dansk  and  Norsk  and  Svenka   file

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How to grep for multiple strings in file on different lines  Use the pipe symbol    for file in   do     test   grep -E  Dansk Norsk Svenska   file   wc -l  -ge 3  amp  amp  echo  file done   Notes    If you use double quotes    with your grep  you will have to escape the pipe like this     to search for Dansk  Norsk and Svenska  Assumes that one line has only one language    Walkthrough  http   www cyberciti biz faq howto-use-grep-command-in-linux-unix

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I did that with two steps  Make a list of csv files in one file With a help of this page comments I made two scriptless steps to get what I needed  Just type into terminal     find  csv file dir -name    csv   gt  csv list txt   grep -q Svenska  cat csv list txt   amp  amp  grep -q Norsk  cat csv list txt   amp  amp  grep -l Dansk  cat csv list txt    it did exactly what I needed - print file names containing all three words    Also mind the symbols like

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Simply   grep  word1  word2  word3      see this post for more info

[bash] grep for multiple strings in file on different lines (ie. whole file, not line based search)?

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