How can I used grep to find a file containing 2 strings?

Question

I am searching for the definition of a macro in a project containing hundreds of source code files.

I am fairly sure the macros are all defined in a single file.

If I do a grep -r search for a single macro, over 1000 hits occur.

I would like to search each file, and find those files containing both macro names.

Can this be done with grep?

For example something like this:

grep -r "MACRO1" AND "MACRO2" ./

Sundeep · Accepted Answer · 2017-07-28 15:37:44Z

Another way is

grep -rlZ 'MACRO1' ./ | xargs -0 grep -l 'MACRO2'

grep -rlZ 'MACRO1' ./ will give filenames containing MACRO1
- -Z is to separate filenames with null character
xargs -0 grep -l 'MACRO2' will give filenames containing MACRO2

Toto · Accepted Answer · 2017-07-28 15:49:41Z

Use:

grep -Pzrl "(?s)(MACRO1.+MACRO2\|MACRO2.+MACRO1)" ./

nitpick: -z uses null character as separator instead of newline character... so if input file contains null character, it won't read whole file all at once..

tso · Accepted Answer · 2017-07-28 15:37:46Z

with gnu grep:

grep -lrZ 'macro1' * |xargs -0 grep -l 'macro2'

it will print files names that contains both macros.

3 Answers 3