To find all the files that contain "foo" in current folder, I use:
grep -r "foo" . To find all the files that contain "bar" in current folder, I use:
grep -r "bar" . But how to find all files that does not contain 'foo' and 'bar'?
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6 Answers
To print lines that do not contain some string, you use the -v flag:
grep -r -v "bar" . | grep -v "foo" This gives you all lines that do not contain foo or bar.
To print files that do not contain some string, you use the -L flag. To non-match several strings, you can use regular expressions with the -P flag (there are several regex flags you can use):
grep -r -L -P "(foo|bar)" . This prints a list of files that don't contain foo or bar.
Thanks to Anton Kovalenko for pointing this out.
4 Comments
Anton Kovalenko
Wrong.
-v is about non-matching lines being present, not about matching lines being absent.
alestanis
@AntonKovalenko You're right, I removed the
-r in the pipe. For the "non-matching lines", that's what the OP is asking for: grep -v "foo" goves lines that do not match foo.Anton Kovalenko
He asks about files that don't contain foo and bar at all, not about files that contain some non-bar lines and some non-foo lines.
alestanis
@AntonKovalenko Oh of course, I just got the subtility, I read a bit too fast.
Recursively searches directories for all files that do no contains XYZ
find . -type f | xargs grep -L "XYZ" 
1 Comment
Robin
I tried your solution and the result is the opposite. I got all files that contained XYZ.
Try this one:
grep -L -e "foo\|bar" * 
Comments
With awk, something like:
awk 'BEGIN {f=ARGV[1] ; ff=0} f != FILENAME { if ( ff>0 ) { print f } ; ff=0 ; f=FILENAME } /SEARCHSTRING/ {ff=1} END {if ( ff>0 ) { print f } }' INPUT_FILE_LIST(PATTERN) Basically it reads every input file and if sees your SEARCHSTRING (which can be a regex), it saves that info. After finishing the current file (or after the last file), check if it found something, and if so, print the previous filename.
2 Comments
julaine
I love this over the grep-answers because I can easily specify in which files to search. Looking for all files that do not import xy is much more noisy than looking for all
*.py **/*.py files not containing an import.julaine
I do not understand how 'print the previous filename if match is found in the current file' solves the question at all. I have confirmed on my files that the results of this are wrong.
Try the below. this should work
grep -rL -P "(foo|bar)" .
Comments
In case you need to find files with a specific extension (or name pattern) not containing a string (or pattern):
find . -name "*.ext" | xargs -n1 grep -r -L -P "(foo|bar)" 