In less, can you search using / for a pattern that contains a carriage return and newline? I know your pattern can end with a line using $ (from How do I include newlines in a search in less?), but I need the pattern to match text that spans multiple lines.
I tried \n, but that only searches for the n character.
It is not possible to match across line boundaries, because the search function in less operates on a single newline-delimited line at a time. This is the case regardless of the system regex implementation (GNU, POSIX, PCRE, etc.).
Please note that I couldn't find an official source repository for the mainline development of less, but for purposes of code review here, the links that follow are from the FreeBSD contrib tree.
See search.c:search_range() for the implementation of the search operation. The loop therein calls line.c:forw_raw_line() to retrieve the next newline-delimited block of content. That block is passed to match.c:match_pattern() where the search pattern (regular expression) is executed.
To match across multiple lines, you'll need to use a different tool. One option is to drop into your editor and use its search capabilities as suggested by others. You can invoke the editor by pressing v in less.
Not sure how to do it in less, but you can accomplish the same in vim.
http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Search_across_multiple_lines
/PATTERN1\\_.\\{-}PATTERN2
The atom \\_. finds any character including end-of-line. The multi \\{-} matches as few as possible.
less is using ed regex syntax and it does not support multiline matching unfortunately.
I was hoping to find that as well, or at least find if this syntax bit was used in less:
RE_DOT_NEWLINE If this bit is set, then the match-any-character operator matches a newline; if this bit isn’t set, then it doesn’t.
So I can use .+ pattern to match newlines. But no, it doesn't.
man less: The pattern is a regular expression, as recognized by the regular expression library supplied by your system.
Nov 23, 2020 at 0:47
\n+for 1 or more newlines?less(search.c:search_range()). The search/match operation is performed on a single newline-delimited line at a time, so you cannot match across line boundaries. Seeline.c:forw_raw_line()for the implementation of "readline" as called bysearch_range.