grep by paragraph in Linux

Question

Is there an option for grep, or some similar program, that will print out a whole paragraph -
defined as the section between two blank lines - containing a given word or phrase?

If not, can anyone suggest a simple script that will do this?

Answer 1

The perl one-liner below demonstrates this. Setting the $/ (input record separator) var to the empty string causes perl to read in "lines" a paragraph at a time.

$ cat /tmp/text
this is a green
this is a red
this is another green

$ perl -e'$/=""; while () { print if /green/ }' /tmp/text
this is a green
this is another green

Answer 2

Try grep -p for this.