[SOLVED] Search for files that contain 2 or more occurrences of a specific word between text with new lines

Issue

I need to search for files that contain 2 or more occurrences of a specific word (in my case NORMAL), so from files like the following:

file1.txt:

the NORMAL things are [

    - case
    - case 2
    
    a NORMAL is like [

        - case 3
        - case 4
        
    ]
    
]

file2.txt:

the NORMAL things are [

    - case
    - case 2
    
    a DIFFERENT is like [

        - case 3
        - case 4
        
    ]
    
]

file3.txt:

the NORMAL things are [

    - case
    - case 2
    
]

it will find file1.txt only.

I have tried with a simple grep:

grep -Ri "*NORMAL*NORMAL*" .

but it does not work.

Thanks

Solution

If you do not wish to search recursively:

grep -lzE '(NORMAL).*\1' files*

If you do wish to search recursively:

grep -rlzE '(NORMAL).*\1' .

This command is checking recursively in the current directory, for the file which contains NORMAL followed by NORMAL(\1) in the file. Meaning it will match 2 or more matches. This is only printing filename, remove -l to print the content + filename.

-l : This would only print the file name if matched by grep
-z: a data line ends in 0 byte, not a newline
-E: use extended regular expression
-r: recursive

Answered By - P....