Grep Search all files in directory for string1 AND string2

Question

How can I make use of grep in cygwin to find all files that contain BOTH words.

This is what I use to search all files in a directory recursively fo

Answer 1

To and together multiple searches, use multiple lookahead assertions, one per thing looked for apart from the last one:

instead of writing

grep -P A  * | grep B

you write

grep -P '(?=.*A)B' *

grep -Pr '(?=.*db-connect\.php)version' .

Don’t write

grep -P 'A.*B|B.*A' *

because that fails on overlaps, whereas the (?=…)(?=…) technique does not.

You can also add in NOT operators as well. To search for lines that don’t match X, you normally of course use -v on the command line. But you can’t do that if it is part of a larger pattern. When it is, you add (?=(?!X).)*$) to the pattern to exclude anything with X in it.

So imagine you want to match lines with all three of A, B, and then either of C or D, but which don’t have X or Y in them. All you need is this:

grep -P '(?=^.*A)(?=^.*B)(?=^(?:(?!X).)*$)(?=^(?:(?!Y).)*$)C|D' *

In some shells and in some settings. you’ll have to escape the ! if it’s your history-substitution character.

There, isn’t that pretty cool?