egrep add search pattern in result

Question

I am searching multiple words in single search like below

egrep -rin 'abc|bbc' folder

I am want to get an output with search keyword in the result like

abc:folder/1.txt:32:abc is here
bbc:folder/ss/2.txt:2:    bbc is here

At least GNU(Linux+) and FreeBSD(Mac) versions of `grep` have `--color` (or `--colour`) which highlights the portion of the line matching the regexp in a different color if your terminal/emulator supports it -- which nearly all do today, although back in the '70s and '80s when people used a wide variety of real/hardware terminals many did not. Note for totally disjoint strings instead of `-E 'foo|bar'` you can use multiple nonextended regexps `-e foo -e bar` — dave_thompson_085, Jun 27 '21 at 10:56
Do you want the regexp you searched for or the string that matched the regexp printed? What should the output be if the regexp matches multiple times on a line? When you say `multiple words` does that mean you actually want to do full-word string comparisons instead of partial-line regexp comparisons as shown in your example? — Ed Morton, Jun 27 '21 at 13:17
Please [edit] your question to include a [mcve] with concise, testable sample input and expected output so we can help you. Don't just show us the trivial, sunny day stuff - show us search strings that contain regexp metachars, matching "words" in the input that exist on their own as well as existing as substrings of other words, etc. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65621325/how-do-i-find-the-text-that-matches-a-pattern for more information on how to ask and create a [mcve] for a question like this. — Ed Morton, Jun 27 '21 at 13:23

Sundeep · Accepted Answer · 2021-06-27T06:24:35.060

Here's some ways:

Post process after all the results:

grep -rinE 'abc|bbc' folder | sed '/abc/{s/^/abc:/; b}; s/^/bbc:/'

If there are many search terms:

$ for p in abc bbc; do echo "/$p/{s/^/$p:/; b};" ; done > script.sed
$ cat script.sed
/abc/{s/^/abc:/; b};
/bbc/{s/^/bbc:/; b};

$ grep -rinE 'abc|bbc' folder | sed -f script.sed

Note that this solution and the next one both will need attention if contents of the search terms can conflict with sed metacharacters.

Post process for each search term:

# add -F option for grep if search terms are fixed string
# quote search terms passed to the for loop if it can contain metacharacters
for p in abc bbc; do grep -rin "$p" folder | sed 's/^/'"$p"':/'; done

With find+gawk

$ cat script.awk
BEGIN {
    OFS = ":"
    a[1] = @/abc/
    a[2] = @/bbc/
}

{
    for (i = 1; i <= 2; i++) {
        if ($0 ~ a[i]) {
            print a[i], FILENAME, FNR, $0
        }
    }
}

$ find folder -type f -exec awk -f script.awk {} +

If you are searching for fixed strings:
- Change array to a[1] = "abc" and a[2] = "bbc"
- Change the condition to if (index($0, a[i]))

I am doing a bulk search in multiple folders, adding search term in loop will slow down the search & search terms will be dynamic — Dyapa Srikanth, Jun 27 '21 at 05:09
@DyapaSrikanth there is no magic bullet, this is what I can think of. As far as I know, there's no built-in option in `grep` or alternate tools like `ripgrep` that can already do this. Use `ripgrep` for faster results since it has parallel processing built-in. — Sundeep, Jun 27 '21 at 05:12

egrep add search pattern in result

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