Grep Search Multiple Words / String Patterns [ Bash Shell ]

Grep is one of the most powerful command-line utility in Linux. It is used to search for a string in a file and display all the lines that contain that string. There are several ways to search multiple words in a file with grep command, and that’s what we’ll be going over today!

In this tutorial, We will show you how to Search Multiple Words (or Strings/Patterns) in a File using Grep along with several examples!

Basic Syntax

The basic syntax to search multiple words in a file is shown below:

grep "word1\|word2" FILE

grep -E "word1|word2" FILE

egrep "word1|word2" FILE

grep -e "word1" -e "word2" FILE

Create a Sample File

For the purpose of this tutorial, create a sample test.txt file with the following contents:

cat test.txt

Output:

hitesh rajesh mahesh jayesh mahesh rajesh hitesh vijay Mahesh Jayesh rajesh Hitesh hitesha is clever boy maheshwari

Seach Multiple Words

In this section, we will show you how to search multiple words in a file with hands-on examples.

Let’s search for pattern hitesh and rajesh in a test.txt file:

grep "hitesh\|rajesh" test.txt

Output:

hitesh rajesh mahesh jayesh mahesh rajesh hitesh vijay Mahesh Jayesh rajesh Hitesh hitesha is clever boy

Example:

You can use option -w with grep command to search for an exact word:

grep -w "hitesh\|rajesh" test.txt

Output:

hitesh rajesh mahesh jayesh mahesh rajesh hitesh vijay Mahesh Jayesh rajesh Hitesh

Example:

You can use option -i to ignore the case as shown below:

grep -iw "mahesh\|rajesh" test.txt

Output:

hitesh rajesh mahesh jayesh mahesh rajesh hitesh vijay Mahesh Jayesh rajesh Hitesh

Example:

If you use -E option with grep command, you just need to use | to separate multiple patterns:

grep -E "mahesh|vijay" test.txt

egrep "mahesh|vijay" test.txt

Output:

hitesh rajesh mahesh jayesh mahesh rajesh hitesh vijay Mahesh maheshwari

Example:

You can use multiple -e option in a single command to use multiple patterns:

grep -e "hitesh" -e "rajesh" -e "vijay" test.txt

Output:

hitesh rajesh mahesh jayesh mahesh rajesh hitesh vijay Mahesh Jayesh rajesh Hitesh hitesha is clever boy

Example:

If you want to search all the lines that contain both “hitesh” and “mahesh” in test.txt file(in the same order), run the following command:

grep -iE "hitesh.*mahesh" test.txt

Output:

hitesh rajesh mahesh hitesh vijay Mahesh

Example:

If you want to search all the lines that contain both “hitesh” and “rajesh” in test.txt file(in any order), run the following command:

grep -iE "hitesh.*rajesh|rajesh.*hitesh" test.txt

Output:

hitesh rajesh mahesh Jayesh rajesh Hitesh

Example:

Conclusion

In the above tutorial, we’ve learned how to find multiple words in a file using the grep command in Linux.

We hope you’ve learned enough to understand each method we’ve covered above. Feel free to comment below with any questions or comments!