Macos – How to perform a second grep on the files returned from a previous grep

bashgrepmacmacosterminal

I often find myself searching through a bunch of code using grep in order to pin down what I'm looking for. Sometimes I get a list of files a little longer than I hoped. At this point I want to perform a second grep, but only searching through the files returned by the first grep search. Is there a way to do this? I basically want to cross-reference two grep searches and only get back the files with both results contained within them.

Best Answer

grep -lZ "first string" * | xargs -0 grep -l "second string"

  • First grep will return the files containing first string.

  • Second grep will do the same for second string, but over the results from the first grep.

  • The -Z argument to grep and the -0 argument to xargs work together to enable support for filenames that include spaces.

Edit - thanks to Ajedi32:

xargs lets you use the results from a command as the arguments to another.

From the xargs's Wikipedia article, xargs is a command on Unix and most Unix-like operating systems used to build and execute command lines from standard input.

Related Question