How can I combine grep with file and extra regex

Question

I have a file of strings in each line.

For example:

AAAAA   
BBBBB   
CCCCC  
etc  

I want to check each string one by one whether it exists in a series of files in a specific directory.

I know that I can do: grep -f filename to do the search. But what I need is to use one more regular expression per line to get more specific results. The file with the strings is big and changes often so it does not make sense to modify each line to add an expression.

So what I need is to combine the grep -f filename to loop over each line of the file (and grep for it in the files) but add some more conditions. E.g. that AAAAA exists and [0-9]{1,3}$ exists as well in the same line.

Answer 1

You can do this stepwise with grep and a pipeline

grep -f your_file list_of_files|grep -E extra_condition

or

while read line; do
    grep -E -e "$line" -e extra_condition list_of_files
done < your_file

In both cases, the -E switch is needed if you're going to use a pattern of the form [0-9]{1,3}$ (i.e. containing numerical quantifiers).

Edit

Thanks to Drav Sloan's comment, we know that the second version (the while loop), not only can be reduced to

grep -E -e "extra_condition" -f your_file list_of_files

but that it actually looks for one pattern or the other not one pattern and the other. You should stick with the first form.

Answer 2

Just to show an altnerative way using awk and grep.

Sample Data

$ cat patterns.txt 
AAAA
BBBB
CCCC
DDDD
EEEE

$ cat sample.txt 
AAAA 1
AAAA 2
AAAA 3
AAAA 4
DDDD 1
DDDD 2
YYYY 1
YYYY 2

Examples

awk #1:

$ awk 'FNR==NR{a[$0]; next}($1 in a)' patterns.txt sample.txt | grep -E "[0-9]{1,3}$"
AAAA 1
AAAA 2
AAAA 3
AAAA 4
DDDD 1
DDDD 2

This will most likely need to be adjusted but gives you a hint as to how to do it.

awk #2:

$ awk 'FNR==NR{a[$0];next};{for (i in a){if (match($0,i)) print}}' patterns.txt sample.txt | grep -E "[0-9]{1,3}$"
AAAA 1
AAAA 2
AAAA 3
AAAA 4
DDDD 1
DDDD 2

This one is more flexible, it can handle the pattern strings being anywhere within the line of the sample data.