One way to search multiple strings with grep is by using a list of those strings in separate text file. cat > pattern.txt string 1 string 2 Now you can use it as " grep -f pattern.txt input_file.txt | ..." Also, in some version of wc it will print the input file name after the line count. You may do: wc -l input_file.txt | awk '{ print $1 }'