How to grep the result of a grep

grep

I need to grep some files to see which ones contain a certain word:

grep -l word *

Next I need to grep that list of files to see which ones contain a different word. The easy way would probably be to write a script but I don't know quite how to work it.

Best Answer

Assuming none of the file names contain whitespace, single quote, double quote or backslash characters (or start with - with GNU grep), you can do:

grep -l word * | xargs grep word2

Xargs will run the second grep over each file from the first grep.

With GNU grep/xargs or compatible, you can make it more reliable with:

grep -lZ word ./* | xargs -r0 grep word2

Using -Z makes grep print the file names NUL-delimited so it can be used with xargs -0. The -r option to xargs avoids the second grep being run if the first grep doesn't find anything.

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