hey guys, basic grep commands would be

#grep -r --col ping ./

or

#grep -i -r --col "sentence to search for" ./

but the sentence has to be exact. is there anyway to grep a sentence that contains those particular strings?

Example Document:

"a server has reported that ping has given code a222"

I can #grep -i -r --col "a server has reported" ./ and it will come out. but if I mix it like this,
#grep -i -r --col "server ping code" ./ it wont work and it will not return anything. Is there anyways to search for a sentence that "might contain some of those strings"? or would I have to use egrep and just break it up?

The quotes should work but be aware this is case sensitive.

If your "when" is actually "When" then it wouldn't find it unless you specified "When..." in your grep OR if you specify the -i option (case insensitivity).

correct, that is why I am using "-i" tag. However, i know i works with the sentence, but what I am trying to say is, the sentence has to be exact. there can not be no mismatch. example would be

"server has failed due to the chip 288"

I can # grep -i -r --col "server has failed" ./ and it will return something, but if I were to
# grep -i -r --col "failed chip 288" ./ it wont return anything because the sentence is not exact match. I was just wondering if there is a way to throw in a sentence and just find strings
or if I had a misspelled word it wont find it neither such as grep -i -r "serv failed chip 288" ./ ( i want it to return failed chip 288 rather than not retunring anything =P )
within that document without it having to have an exact match. I know you can use egrep, but its pretty annoying using the | in between strings.

egrep (or grep -E) allows for or with the pipe sign as you have but doesn't have an "and" character.

However you can emulate "and" by using .* in your search:

egrep -i -r --col "sentence.*to.*search.*for" ./

The . matches any single character.

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Well as you might expect, if you misspell a word I do not believe anything can help you. The computer is not going to spell check prior to running your regex.

As for a sentence containing certain words, yes it is easily done with a regex, however, you must first consider just how mixed up will the words be that you use.
For example, based on the sentence ... "server has failed due to the chip 288", if your code were to use any of those words out of sequence then a single regex cannot help you.

So try googling for regular expressions and see how you go