[NTLUG:Discuss] Finding different strings in a single file

[Robert Pearson]

On Dec 6, 2007 11:26 PM, Leroy Tennison <leroy_tennison at prodigy.net> wrote:
> I have a situation where I need to check for several strings in a given
> file.  For example, are the following listed in /etc/services:
>
> chargen
> echo
> discard
> daytime
>
> What I've done so far is grep for each one individually but it's getting
> old.  I could write an awk script but I'm not sure that's less painful.
>   Is there a more elegant method?  In looking at 'find' I noticed xargs
> but it's man page was close to totally unilluminating to me.

"egrep" is a solution for this.

egrep -i  'chargen|echo|discard|daytime'  /etc/services