How do I find files that do not contain a given string pattern?

Question

How do I find out the files in the current directory which do not contain the word foo (using grep)?

Answer 1

You will actually need:

find .  -not  -ipath '.*svn*' -exec  grep  -H -E -o -c  "foo"  {} \; | grep :0\$

Answer 2

You can do it with grep alone (without find).

grep -riL "foo" .

This is the explanation of the parameters used on grep

     -L, --files-without-match
             each file processed.
     -R, -r, --recursive
             Recursively search subdirectories listed.

     -i, --ignore-case
             Perform case insensitive matching.

If you use l (lowercased) you will get the opposite (files with matches)

     -l, --files-with-matches
             Only the names of files containing selected lines are written

Answer 3

If you are using git, this searches all of the tracked files:

git grep -L "foo"

and you can search in a subset of tracked files if you have ** subdirectory globbing turned on (shopt -s globstar in .bashrc, see this):

git grep -L "foo" -- **/*.cpp

Answer 4

another alternative when grep doesn't have the -L option (IBM AIX for example), with nothing but grep and the shell :

for file in * ; do grep -q 'my_pattern' $file || echo $file ; done