Grep Files from List – Efficient Methods and Commands

You can try a naive approach to match non-comments like this:

 $ egrep -v "^(//|/\*| \*)" sourcecode

This will only inverse match against prefixed comments - that is lines starting with either //, /*, * or */ - and hence it'll not leave out blocks that are commented out with the /* and */ pair.

Since agrep seems not to be present in your system, have a look in this alternative based on sed and awk to apply grep with and operation from patterns read by a local file.

PS: Since you use osx i'm not sure if the awk version you have will support bellow usage.

awk can simulate grep with AND operation of multiple patterns in this usage:
awk '/pattern1/ && /pattern2/ && /pattern3/'

So you could transform your pattern file from this:

$ cat ./tmp/d1.txt
"surveillance data" "surveillance technology" "cctv camera"
"social media" "surveillance techniques" "enforcement agencies"
"social control" "surveillance camera" "social security"
"surveillance data" "security guards" "social networking"
"surveillance mechanisms" "cctv surveillance" "contemporary surveillance"

To this:

$ sed 's/" "/\/ \&\& \//g; s/^"/\//g; s/"$/\//g' ./tmp/d1.txt
/surveillance data/ && /surveillance technology/ && /cctv camera/
/social media/ && /surveillance techniques/ && /enforcement agencies/
/social control/ && /surveillance camera/ && /social security/
/surveillance data/ && /security guards/ && /social networking/
/surveillance mechanisms/ && /cctv surveillance/ && /contemporary surveillance/

PS: You can redirect the output to another file by using >anotherfile in the end , or you can use the sed -i option to make in-place changes in the same search terms pattern file.

Then you just need to feed awk with awk-formatted patterns from this pattern file :

$ while IFS= read -r line;do awk "$line" *.txt;done<./tmp/d1.txt #d1.txt = my test pattern file

You could also not transform patterns in your original pattern file by applying sed in each line of this original pattern file like this:

while IFS= read -r line;do 
  line=$(sed 's/" "/\/ \&\& \//g; s/^"/\//g; s/"$/\//g' <<<"$line")
  awk "$line" *.txt
done <./tmp/d1.txt

Or as one-liner:

$ while IFS= read -r line;do line=$(sed 's/" "/\/ \&\& \//g; s/^"/\//g; s/"$/\//g' <<<"$line"); awk "$line" *.txt;done <./tmp/d1.txt

Above commands return the correct AND results in my test files that look like this:

$ cat d2.txt
This guys over there have the required surveillance technology to do the job.
The other guys not only have efficient surveillance technology, but they also gather surveillance data by one cctv camera.

$ cat d3.txt
All surveillance data are locked.
All surveillance data are locked and guarded by security guards.
There are several surveillance mechanisms (i.e cctv surveillance, contemporary surveillance, etv)

Results:

$ while IFS= read -r line;do awk "$line" *.txt;done<./tmp/d1.txt
#or while IFS= read -r line;do line=$(sed 's/" "/\/ \&\& \//g; s/^"/\//g; s/"$/\//g' <<<"$line"); awk "$line" *.txt;done <./tmp/d1.txt
The other guys not only have efficient surveillance technology, but they also gather surveillance data by one cctv camera.
There are several surveillance mechanisms (i.e cctv surveillance, contemporary surveillance, etv)

Update:
Above awk solution prints the contents of matching txt files.
If you want to display the filenames instead of the contents, then use the following awk where necessary:

awk "$line""{print FILENAME}" *.txt