How do I search by multiple keywords when using awk or grep?

Question

I have a collection of files. I want to search through them all with grep to find all and only those which contain anywhere within them both the strings keyword1 and keyword2.

I would also like to know how to do this with awk.

Answer 1

For grep, the pipe symbol separates strings in a combination regexp; on some systems, it may be necessary to use egrep to activate this functionality:

[madhatta@anni ~]$ egrep 'exact|obsol' /etc/yum.conf
exactarch=1
obsoletes=1

I would expect the syntax to be similar for awk.

Edit: yup:

[madhatta@anni ~]$ awk '/exact|obsol/ {print $1}' /etc/yum.conf
exactarch=1
obsoletes=1

Edit 2:

You have clarified your request, so here's how to do it with grep:

grep -l keyword1 * | xargs -d '\n' grep -l keyword2

This will search all the files in a given directory (*) for keyword1, passing the list of matching files onto the second grep, which will search for the second string, via xargs. I'm afraid I won't be bothering to do this with awk as it's beginning to sound a bit like a homework problem. If you have a business case for using awk, let us know.

Answer 2

Search in one file

Using grep to find lines with either "keyword1" or "keyword2" in the file "myfile.conf":

grep -e "keyword1\|keyword2" myfile.conf

The escaping of the pipe | character with a backslash is at least required in zsh.

Search in all files in a directory

To search for files containing either "keyword1" or "keyword2" in a directory:

grep -r -e "keyword1\|keyword2" /path/to/my/directory

If you want to do a case-insensitive search, add the -i option as well.

Answer 3

If I understand correctly, you want to search all the files which contains keyword1 and keyword2 in a specific folder, so, try this:

$ find /path/to/folder -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -li "keyword1" | \
                                    xargs -I '{}' grep -li "keyword2" '{}'

• -print0 | xargs -0 take cares of file names with blank spaces
• -I tells xargs to replace '{}' with the argument list
• grep -li prints file name instead of matching pattern. I use -i for case insensitive.