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

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.