Most regular expression engines make it easy to match al­ter­na­tions (or dis­junc­tions) with the | operator: to match either foo or bar, use foo|bar.

Few regex engines have any provisions for con­junc­tions, and the syntax is often horrible. Awk makes it easy to match /pat1/ && /pat2/ && /pat3/.

$ cat <<EOF | awk '/bar/ && /foo/'
> foo bar
> bar
> barfy food
> barfly
> EOF
foo bar
barfy food

In the case of a Unix pipeline, the con­junc­tion could also be expressed as a series of pipes: ... | grep pat1 | grep pat2 | grep pat3 | ....

The longest regex that I ever en­coun­tered was an enormous al­ter­na­tion—a true horror that shouldn’t have been a regex at all.