use grep to return a list of files, given multiple keywords (like google returns a list of webpages)

Question

I need to find ALL files that have multiple keywords anywhere in the file (not necessarily on the same line), given a starting directory like ~/. Does "grep -ro" do this?

(I'm using Unix, Mac OSX 10.4)

Answer 1

You can use the -l option to get a list of filenames with matches, so it's just a matter of finding all of the files that have the first keyword and then filtering that list down to the files that also have the second keyword:

grep -rl first_keyword basedir | xargs grep -l second_keyword

Answer 2

To search just *.txt

find ~/. -name "*.txt" | xargs grep -l first_keyword | xargs grep -l second_keyword

Thanks Adam!