[waynesonfire]

very frequently I want to chain grep things... I lean on the "|" operator for this, e.g. cat hello | grep foo | grep bar and it seems verbose. any tips?

[xorcist]

That kind of matches are what regexps were intended for:

  grep "foo.*bar" hello

Unfortunately, the basic grep syntax doesn't give you an easy way of specifying both orders, so that would have to be something like:

  grep -e "foo.*bar" -e "bar.*foo" hello

You can specify random order in a couple of different ways with Perl-compatible regexes, such as lookaheading the search terms from the end of line marker. But it's not as easy to read as it should be.

[danadam]

With sed instead of grep, and probably not much better, but in a single command:

  cat hello | sed -n '/foo/{ /bar/{ /baz/ p }}'

[ravoori]

with awk: <hello awk '/foo/ && /bar/ && /baz/'

[BenjiWiebe]

Keep doing it that way, I'd say. The other replies are ways to do it without chaining grep, but they don't seem any less verbose and definitely are less obvious.