Recursively looks for text files

[Langstracht]

I have been trying to cobble together a script that does the following:

asks me to input 2 separate strings (2 single words if that's the technical limit)

recursively looks for text files (purposely excluding binaries) that contain both the words

displays each file that contains the words consecutively

and

keeps each file on the screen until I do something (hit "Enter" perhaps or TAB)

I have played around with grep, -egrep, cat etc. and basically gotten nowhere.

Can anyone help? Please,

Thanks in advance.

[steeldriver]

AFAIK there's no easy way to logically AND matches in grep - you basically need to grep each file that contains pattern1 again to see if it contains pattern2, e.g. something like

while read -rd $'\0' file; do grep -qIw 'pattern1' "$file" && grep -qIw 'pattern2' "$file" && echo "$file"; done < <(find . -type f -print0)

Note that the bash && logical operator is a 'short-circuit' evaluator i.e. it only executes the second grep if the first one returns true - so it's not as inefficient as all that (and it only echos the filename if both greps return true, which completes the test)

[Langstracht]

Thanks so much for your very complete and very prompt response.

I guess what I wrote may have not been as precise as it should have been,

What I want the script to do is show me (the content of) the file. The code you have so kindly provided lists the filename(s).

That said, I think it "does the job" but it would be much easier to verify that if I saw the file(s).

And that said, I really wanted an interrogative ... or perhaps you're saying that's not possible.

Finally the complexity of the code fully explains why my pea brain wasn't able to get anywhere.

Thanks again.

[steeldriver]

You can replace the echo "$file" command with any other command you want to perform on the matching "$file" e.g. to cat the contents

while read -rd $'\0' file; do grep -qIw 'pattern1' "$file"  && grep -qIw 'pattern2' "$file" && cat  "$file"; done < <(find . -type f -print0)

or to echo the name and then cat the contents - note the use of a subshell ( ... )

while read -rd $'\0' file; do grep -qIw 'pattern1' "$file" && grep -qIw 'pattern2' "$file" && (echo "$file: "; cat "$file"); done < <(find . -type f -print0)

If your pattern1 and pattern2 are variables you will need to use double quotes not single quotes, like "$pattern1", "$pattern2" for example

read -p "Please enter the first pattern: " pattern1

read -p "Please enter the second pattern: " pattern2

while read -rd $'\0' file; do 
    grep -qIw "$pattern1" "$file" && grep -qIw "$pattern2" "$file" && (echo "$file: "; cat "$file")
done < <(find . -type f -print0)

[Vaphell]

you can skip the find part entirely as grep is able to perform recursive searches and generate list files

while read -rd $'\0' file
do
  grep -qIw "$pattern2" "$file" && (echo "$file: "; cat "$file")
done < <( grep -ZlrIw "$pattern1" . )

[Langstracht]

steeldriver - I have tried all 3 of your suggestions and I think they ALL display all the files that they are supposed to.

Thank you so VERY much.

Why do I "think" they do? Well, because there is no pause/freeze between files - just one continuous outpouring.

Is this fixable do you think?

[Vaphell]

few changes:

while read -r -u 3 -d $'\0' file
do
  ...
  read -p "Press Enter to continue..."
done 3< <( ... )

[Langstracht]

Vaphell - I tried your code.

Dunno why but I get the following error:

emailfind2.sh: 6: Syntax error: redirection unexpected

[Vaphell]

$ echo $pattern1 $pattern2
echo bash
$ while read -r -u 3 -d $'\0' file; do   echo "=== $file ========================" && grep -P "$pattern1|$pattern2|$" "$file"; read -p "Press Enter to continue..."; done 3< <( grep -ZlrIw "$pattern1" . 2>/dev/null | xargs -0 grep -Zlw "$pattern2" )
=== ./syntax.sh ========================
#!/bin/bash

if [ -f file ]
then
  echo line1
  echo line2
else
  echo line3
fi
Press Enter to continue...

grep -P inside the loop is only used to colorize the output

[Langstracht]

Well I still don't know why I got that error. But I DO know how to get rid of it.

I did some playing around and found that using

bash emailfind2.sh

works just fine. It seems to me I've been "caught" with that before. Sorry about that.

Just missing that elusive "in between" pause and we're good to go.