https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2686147/how-to-find-patterns-across-multiple-lines-using-grep
I relied heavily on pcregrep, but with newer grep you do not need to install pcregrep for many of its features. Just use grep -P.
In the example of the OP's question, I think the following options work nicely, with the second best matching how I understand the question:
grep -Pzo "abc(.|\n)*efg" /tmp/tes* grep -Pzl "abc(.|\n)*efg" /tmp/tes*I copied the text as /tmp/test1 and deleted the 'g' and saved as /tmp/test2. Here is the output showing that the first shows the matched string and the second shows only the filename (typical -o is to show match and typical -l is to show only filename). Note that the 'z' is necessary for multiline and the '(.|\n)' means to match either 'anything other than newline' or 'newline' - i.e. anything:
user@host:~$ grep -Pzo "abc(.|\n)*efg" /tmp/tes* /tmp/test1:abc blah blah blah.. blah blah.. blah blah.. blah efg user@host:~$ grep -Pzl "abc(.|\n)*efg" /tmp/tes* /tmp/test1To determine if your version is new enough, run man grep and see if something similar to this appears near the top:
-P, --perl-regexp Interpret PATTERN as a Perl regular expression (PCRE, see below). This is highly experimental and grep -P may warn of unimplemented features.That is from GNU grep 2.10.