In addition to what wbport suggested, there are some other alternatives in cases where the strings you are looking for all occur on a single line in your log files...

If the strings you are searching for always appear in the same order on a line (i.e., A1 followed by A2 followed by A3), you can use:

Code:

grep 'A1.*A2.*A3' file

If they can appear in any order, try one of the following:

Code:

egrep 'A1.*A2.*A3|A1.*A3.*A2|A2.*A1.*A3|A2.*A3.*A1|A3.*A1.*A2|A3.*A2.*A1' file
grep -e 'A1.*A2.*A3' -e 'A1.*A3.*A2' -e 'A2.*A1.*A3' -e 'A2.*A3.*A1' -e 'A3.*A1.*A2' -e 'A3.*A2.*A1' file

or create a file containing your REs (named REfile in this example) containing:

Code:

A1.*A2.*A3
A1.*A3.*A2
A2.*A1.*A3
A2.*A3.*A1
A3.*A1.*A2
A3.*A2.*A1

and then use:

Code:

grep -f REfile file

Note that if the strings you're searching for do not all appear on a single line, the code suggested by wbport will only print lines containing A3 (not lines containing just A1 or A2). If you want to print all lines containing A1, A2, or A3 but only print those lines if the file contains all three strings, you need an extra level of grep to print the final results (i.e. read some of your files four times when looking for 3 strings; three times to find the names of files that contain each string and a final time to print all three strings (using OR instead of AND). Or, you can use awk to read the file once, gather lines that match any of your strings and keep track of which strings have been found, and then print all matching lines at the end if all of your strings have been found. If this is what you need, we can help you figure out a way to do that, but I'm not going to try to do it here if you don't need to do that. Your description of your problem isn't clear as to the extent of the problem you're trying to solve.