The syntax looks like this: grep -E 'bee|Vanessa' ~/work/beescript.txt Let's say, for example, you wanted to find every occurrence of the words bee and Vanessa in a text document containing the script from the 2007 Bee movie. This syntax, using the ~ and /, followed by the location of the file in the home folder, is what you'll use to show the grep command which files to search. For example, if you wanted to enter the path for a text document located in a folder called work inside the home folder, you'd reference it using this format: ~/work/textdocument.txt You'll also need to be familiar with how to reference files by path using the terminal. First, you'll need to be able to bring up a terminal-on most systems, you do this with the key combination Ctrl + Alt + T, or via the applications menu. This article focuses on how to search multiple strings using grep and will show you a few similar tips and tricks for using grep in general.īefore getting started, you'll need to make sure you are familiar with a few Linux basics. If you are looking for some information within the documents on your machine, usually, you'll be looking for several words at once.

Grep is extremely powerful but can be quite intimidating to use, so today, you'll learn some basics. It stands for Global Regular Expression Print, printing the results of user-defined system searches for collections of characters.

The Linux terminal is full of useful commands, but few are as powerful as the seemingly simple grep.

Use grep to find word in multiple files