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 blah..
blah blah..
blah abc blah
blah blah..
blah blah..
blah blah..
blah efg blah blah
blah blah..
blah blah..
Should be matched.
you can use grep incase you are not keen in the sequence of the pattern.
grep -l "pattern1" filepattern*.* | xargs grep "pattern2"
example
grep -l "vector" *.cpp | xargs grep "map"
grep -l will find all the files which matches the first pattern, and xargs will grep for the second pattern. Hope this helps.
This should work too?!
perl -lpne 'print $ARGV if /abc.*?efg/s' file_list
$ARGV contains the name of the current file when reading from file_list
/s modifier searches across newline.
This can be done easily by first using tr to replace the newlines with some other character:
tr '\n' '\a' | grep -o 'abc.*def' | tr '\a' '\n'
Here, I am using the alarm character, \a (ASCII 7) in place of a newline.
This is almost never found in your text, and grep can match it with a ., or match it specifically with \a.
Sadly, you can't. From the grep docs:
grep searches the named input FILEs (or standard input if no files are named, or if a single hyphen-minus (-) is given as file name) for lines containing a match to the given PATTERN.
Why not something simple like:
egrep -o 'abc|efg' $file | grep -A1 abc | grep efg | wc -l
returns 0 or a positive integer.
egrep -o (Only shows matches, trick: multiple matches on the same line produce multi-line output as if they are on different lines)
grep -A1 abc (print abc and the line after it)
grep efg | wc -l (0-n count of efg lines found after abc on the same or following lines, result can be used in an 'if")
grep can be changed to egrep etc. if pattern matching is needed
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.
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
I used this to extract a fasta sequence from a multi fasta file using the -P option for grep:
grep -Pzo ">tig00000034[^>]+" file.fasta > desired_sequence.fasta
The core of the regexp is the [^>] which translates to "not greater than symbol"
I relied heavily on pcregrep, but with newer grep you do not need to install pcregrep for many of its features. Just use grep -P.
In the example of the OP's question, I think the following options work nicely, with the second best matching how I understand the question:
grep -Pzo "abc(.|\n)*efg" /tmp/tes*
grep -Pzl "abc(.|\n)*efg" /tmp/tes*
I copied the text as /tmp/test1 and deleted the 'g' and saved as /tmp/test2. Here is the output showing that the first shows the matched string and the second shows only the filename (typical -o is to show match and typical -l is to show only filename). Note that the 'z' is necessary for multiline and the '(.|\n)' means to match either 'anything other than newline' or 'newline' - i.e. anything:
user@host:~$ grep -Pzo "abc(.|\n)*efg" /tmp/tes*
/tmp/test1:abc blah
blah blah..
blah blah..
blah blah..
blah efg
user@host:~$ grep -Pzl "abc(.|\n)*efg" /tmp/tes*
/tmp/test1
To determine if your version is new enough, run man grep and see if something similar to this appears near the top:
-P, --perl-regexp
Interpret PATTERN as a Perl regular expression (PCRE, see
below). This is highly experimental and grep -P may warn of
unimplemented features.
That is from GNU grep 2.10.
With ugrep released a few months ago:
ugrep 'abc(\n|.)+?efg'
This tool is highly optimized for speed. It's also GNU/BSD/PCRE-grep compatible.
Note that we should use a lazy repetition +?, unless you want to match all lines with efg together until the last efg in the file.
#!/bin/bash
shopt -s nullglob
for file in *
do
r=$(awk '/abc/{f=1}/efg/{g=1;exit}END{print g&&f ?1:0}' file)
if [ "$r" -eq 1 ];then
echo "Found pattern in $file"
else
echo "not found"
fi
done
The filepattern *.sh is important to prevent directories to be inspected. Of course some test could prevent that too.
for f in *.sh
do
a=$( grep -n -m1 abc $f )
test -n "${a}" && z=$( grep -n efg $f | tail -n 1) || continue
(( ((${z/:*/}-${a/:*/})) > 0 )) && echo $f
done
The
grep -n -m1 abc $f
searches maximum 1 matching and returns (-n) the linenumber. If a match was found (test -n ...) find the last match of efg (find all and take the last with tail -n 1).
z=$( grep -n efg $f | tail -n 1)
else continue.
Since the result is something like 18:foofile.sh String alf="abc"; we need to cut away from ":" till end of line.
((${z/:*/}-${a/:*/}))
Should return a positive result if the last match of the 2nd expression is past the first match of the first.
Then we report the filename echo $f.
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.
I don't know how I would do that with grep, but I would do something like this with awk:
awk '/abc/{ln1=NR} /efg/{ln2=NR} END{if(ln1 && ln2 && ln1 < ln2){print "found"}else{print "not found"}}' foo
You need to be careful how you do this, though. Do you want the regex to match the substring or the entire word? add \w tags as appropriate. Also, while this strictly conforms to how you stated the example, it doesn't quite work when abc appears a second time after efg. If you want to handle that, add an if as appropriate in the /abc/ case etc.
This should work:
cat FILE | egrep 'abc|efg'
If there is more than one match you can filter out using grep -v
To search recursively across all files (across multiple lines within each file) with BOTH strings present (i.e. string1 and string2 on different lines and both present in same file):
grep -r -l 'string1' * > tmp; while read p; do grep -l 'string2' $p; done < tmp; rm tmp
To search recursively across all files (across multiple lines within each file) with EITHER string present (i.e. string1 and string2 on different lines and either present in same file):
grep -r -l 'string1\|string2' *
While the sed option is the simplest and easiest, LJ's one-liner is sadly not the most portable. Those stuck with a version of the C Shell will need to escape their bangs:
sed -e '/abc/,/efg/\!d' [file]
This unfortunately does not work in bash et al.
I'm not sure if it is possible with grep, but sed makes it very easy:
sed -e '/abc/,/efg/!d' [file-with-content]
With silver searcher:
ag 'abc.*(\n|.)*efg'
similar to ring bearer's answer, but with ag instead. Speed advantages of silver searcher could possibly shine here.
If you have some estimation about the distance between the 2 strings 'abc' and 'efg' you are looking for, you might use:
grep -r . -e 'abc' -A num1 -B num2 | grep 'efg'
That way, the first grep will return the line with the 'abc' plus #num1 lines after it, and #num2 lines after it, and the second grep will sift through all of those to get the 'efg'. Then you'll know at which files they appear together.
awk one-liner:
awk '/abc/,/efg/' [file-with-content]
As an alternative to Balu Mohan's answer, it is possible to enforce the order of the patterns using only grep, head and tail:
for f in FILEGLOB; do tail $f -n +$(grep -n "pattern1" $f | head -n1 | cut -d : -f 1) 2>/dev/null | grep "pattern2" &>/dev/null && echo $f; done
This one isn't very pretty, though. Formatted more readably:
for f in FILEGLOB; do
tail $f -n +$(grep -n "pattern1" $f | head -n1 | cut -d : -f 1) 2>/dev/null \
| grep -q "pattern2" \
&& echo $f
done
This will print the names of all files where "pattern2" appears after "pattern1", or where both appear on the same line:
$ echo "abc
def" > a.txt
$ echo "def
abc" > b.txt
$ echo "abcdef" > c.txt; echo "defabc" > d.txt
$ for f in *.txt; do tail $f -n +$(grep -n "abc" $f | head -n1 | cut -d : -f 1) 2>/dev/null | grep -q "def" && echo $f; done
a.txt
c.txt
d.txt
tail -n +i - print all lines after the ith, inclusivegrep -n - prepend matching lines with their line numbershead -n1 - print only the first rowcut -d : -f 1 - print the first cut column using : as the delimiter2>/dev/null - silence tail error output that occurs if the $() expression returns emptygrep -q - silence grep and return immediately if a match is found, since we are only interested in the exit codesed should suffice as poster LJ stated above,
instead of !d you can simply use p to print:
sed -n '/abc/,/efg/p' file
Here is a solution inspired by this answer:
if 'abc' and 'efg' can be on the same line:
grep -zl 'abc.*efg' <your list of files>
if 'abc' and 'efg' must be on different lines:
grep -Pzl '(?s)abc.*\n.*efg' <your list of files>
Params:
-P Use perl compatible regular expressions (PCRE).
-z Treat the input as a set of lines, each terminated by a zero byte instead of a newline. i.e. grep treats the input as a one big line.
-l list matching filenames only.
(?s) activate PCRE_DOTALL, which means that '.' finds any character or newline.
If you need both words are close each other, for example no more than 3 lines, you can do this:
find . -exec grep -Hn -C 3 "abc" {} \; | grep -C 3 "efg"
Same example but filtering only *.txt files:
find . -name *.txt -exec grep -Hn -C 3 "abc" {} \; | grep -C 3 "efg"
And also you can replace grep command with egrep command if you want also find with regular expressions.
Source: Stackoverflow.com