Find files that does not contain a string

Question

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 curren

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

Recursively searches directories for all files that do no contains XYZ

find . -type f | xargs grep -L "XYZ"

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

Try this one:

  grep  -L -e  "foo\|bar" *

Answer 5

Try the below. this should work

grep -rL -P "(foo|bar)" .