Package: grep Version: 3.3-1 Severity: wishlist (Surely someone has already asked for this, but I can't see where. I may have already reported this myself, and forgotten. If so, sorry!)
Right now if you do grep -eX -eY -eZ You'll get lines that match *any of* X, Y, or Z. Quite often I want to search for lines that match *all of* X, Y, and Z — but in any order. For example, # all 4TB 2.5-inch SATA products grep -Fwi -eSATA -e2TB -e2.5in products.csv Below is a short discussion of the workarounds I know about. Is "grep --and" something that has already been discussed and rejected? I looked through debbugs.gnu.org and the source tarball, but I couldn't find anything about this. PS: grep -v --and would intuitively mean "not all", i.e. "grep -v --and -eX -eY" would return lines matching X *or* Y, but omit lines matching *both* X and Y. PS: I can't decide if "--and" or "--intersection" is a better name. I put both in the bug subject so people searching for either will find this ticket. I think "--all" is probably too confusing. Workaround #1 ============= I can work around this by listing every possible order, but 1) this scales poorly with the number of patterns; and 2) it can't be used with -F. For example, grep --and -eX -eY -eZ input*.txt # becomes grep -eZ.*Y.*X \ -eZ.*X.*Y \ -eY.*Z.*X \ -eY.*X.*Z \ -eX.*Z.*Y \ -eX.*Y.*Z \ input*.txt Workaround #2 ============= I can pipe greps together. This is what I currently do. This is more convenient and feels faster than workaround #1, but I suspect the inter-process overhead is significant. If grep implemented this internally, it could zero-copy. Being able to "grep -rnH --and" &c would also be convenient. For example, grep --and -F -eX -eY -eZ input*.txt # becomes cat input*.txt | grep -F -eX | grep -F -eY | grep -F -eZ