<p>I needed to find all the files that contained a specific string pattern. The first solution that comes to mind is using <em>find</em> piped with <em>xargs grep</em>:</p>

<pre><code>find . -iname '*.py' | xargs grep -e 'YOUR_PATTERN'
</code></pre>

<p>But if I need to find patterns that spans on more than one line, I'm stuck because vanilla grep can't find multiline patterns.</p>

So I discovered
pcregrep
which stands for
Perl Compatible Regular Expressions GREP
.
the -M option makes it possible to search for patterns that span line boundaries.
For example, you need to find files where the '
_name
' variable is followed on the next line by the '
_description
' variable:
```
```
find . -iname '*.py' | xargs pcregrep -M '_name.*\n.*_description'
```
```
Tip: you need to include the line break character in your pattern. Depending on your platform, it could be '\n', \r', '\r\n', ...