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

2018-06-16 16:41:13

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:

find . -iname '*.py' | xargs grep -e 'YOUR_PATTERN'

But if I need to find patterns that spans on more than one line, I'm stuck because vanilla grep can't find multiline patterns.

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', 'rn', ...

你为什么不去awk：

awk '/Start pattern/,/End pattern/' filename

Here is the example using GNU grep :

grep -Pzo '_name.*n.*_description'

-z / --null-data Treat input and output data as sequences of lines.

链接地址: http://www.djcxy.com/p/47240.html