Question

I am trying to grep a file for lines with two strings, so string1 logical_AND string2.

Example line to grep for:

The quick brown fox and the cat

I want to grep out that line by matching for “quick” and “the cat”, note the space between “the” and “cat”. That is what is throwing me off.

grep .*quick.*cat myfile

This works fine but I want to grep for “the cat” and;

grep .*quick.*the cat myfile

Obviously doesn’t work because of the space. I don’t understand how I can encompass “the cat” with the space in it?

Answer 1

Try putting quotes around the string you are searching for i.e.

grep ".*quick.*the cat" myfile