How can I search for a multiline pattern in a file?

Question

I needed to find all the files that contained a specific string pattern. The first solution that comes to mind is using find piped with xargs grep:

Answer 1

So I discovered pcregrep which stands for Perl Compatible Regular Expressions GREP.

For example, you need to find files where the '_name' variable is immediatelly followed by the '_description' variable:

find . -iname '*.py' | xargs pcregrep -M '_name.*\n.*_description'

Tip: you need to include the line break character in your pattern. Depending on your platform, it could be '\n', \r', '\r\n', ...