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

User · Accepted Answer

The following command gives me all the files that do not contain the pattern foo   find    -not  -ipath    svn   -exec  grep  -H -E -o -c   foo           grep 0

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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

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Problem  I need to refactor a large project which uses  phtml files to write out HTML using inline PHP code   I want to use Mustache templates instead   I want to find any  phtml giles which do not contain the string new Mustache as these still need to be rewritten   Solution  find   -iname    phtml  -exec grep -H -E -o -c  new Mustache          grep  0    sed  s         Explanation  Before the pipes   Find  find   Find files recursively  starting in this directory  -iname    phtml  Filename must contain  phtml  the i makes it case-insensitive   -exec  grep -H -E -o -c  new Mustache      Run the grep command on each of the matched paths  Grep  -H Always print filename headers with output lines   -E Interpret pattern as an extended regular expression  i e  force grep  to behave as egrep    -o Prints only the matching part of the lines   -c Only a count of selected lines is written to standard output     This will give me a list of all file paths ending in  phtml  with a count of the number of times the string new Mustache occurs in each of them     gt  find   -iname    phtml   -exec  grep -H -E -o -c  new Mustache           app MyApp Customer View Account quickcodemanagestore phtml 0   app MyApp Customer View Account studio phtml 0   app MyApp Customer View Account orders phtml 1   app MyApp Customer View Account banking phtml 1   app MyApp Customer View Account applycomplete phtml 1   app MyApp Customer View Account catalogue phtml 1   app MyApp Customer View Account classadd phtml 0   app MyApp Customer View Account orders-trade phtml 0   The first pipe grep  0  filters this list to only include lines ending in  0     gt  find   -iname    phtml  -exec grep -H -E -o -c  new Mustache          grep  0     app MyApp Customer View Account quickcodemanagestore phtml 0   app MyApp Customer View Account studio phtml 0   app MyApp Customer View Account classadd phtml 0   app MyApp Customer View Account orders-trade phtml 0   The second pipe sed  s        strips off the final two characters of each line  leaving just the file paths     gt  find   -iname    phtml  -exec grep -H -E -o -c  new Mustache          grep  0    sed  s           app MyApp Customer View Account quickcodemanagestore phtml   app MyApp Customer View Account studio phtml   app MyApp Customer View Account classadd phtml   app MyApp Customer View Account orders-trade phtml

User · Answer

The following command excludes the need for the find to filter out the svn folders by using a second grep   grep -rL  foo        grep -v    svn

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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

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Open bug report  As commented by  tukan  there is an open bug report for Ag regarding the -L --files-without-matches flag    ggreer the silver searcher   238 - --files-without-matches does not work properly   As there is little progress to the bug report  the -L option mentioned below should not be relied on  not as long as the bug has not been resolved  Use different approaches presented in this thread instead  Citing a comment for the bug report  emphasis mine       Any updates on this  -L completely ignores matches on the first line of the file  Seems like if this isn t going to be fixed soon  the flag should be removed entirely  as it effectively does not work as advertised at all      The Silver Searcher - Ag  intended function - see bug report   As a powerful alternative to grep  you could use the The Silver Searcher - Ag      A code searching tool similar to ack  with a focus on speed    Looking at man ag  we find the -L or --files-without-matches option         OPTIONS              -L --files-without-matches            Only print the names of files that don  t contain matches     I e   to recursively search for files that do not match foo  from current directory   ag -L foo   To only search current directory for files that do not match foo  simply specify --depth 0 for the recursion   ag -L foo --depth 0

User · Answer

When you use find  you have two basic options  filter results out after find has completed searching or use some built in option that will prevent find from considering those files and dirs matching some given pattern  If you use the former approach on a high number of files and dirs  You will be using a lot of CPU and RAM just to pass the result on to a second process which will in turn filter out results by using a lot of resources as well  If you use the -not keyword which is a find argument  you will be preventing any path matching the string on the -name or -regex argument behind from being considered  which will be much more efficient  find   -not -regex  quot    foo    quot  -regex  quot    quot   Then  any path that is not filtered out by -not will be captured by the subsequent -regex arguments

User · Answer

find  20161109  -mtime -2 grep -vwE   TRIGGER    You can specify the filter under  find  and the exclusion string under  grep -vwE   Use mtime under find if you need to filter on modified time too

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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

User · Answer

grep -irnw  filepath  -ve  pattern    or  grep -ve  pattern   lt  file   above command will give us the result as -v finds the inverse of the pattern  being searched

User · Answer

If your grep has the -L  or --files-without-match  option     grep -L  foo

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I had good luck with  grep -H -E -o -c  foo        ext   grep ext 0   My attempts with grep -v just gave me all the lines without  foo

User · Answer

Take a look at ack   It does the  svn exclusion for you automatically  gives you Perl regular expressions  and is a simple download of a single Perl program    The equivalent of what you re looking for should be  in ack   ack -L foo

User · Answer

You will actually need   find    -not  -ipath    svn   -exec  grep  -H -E -o -c   foo           grep  0

User · Answer

The following command could help you to filter the lines which include the substring  foo    cat file   grep -v  foo

User · Answer

My grep does not have any -L option  I do find workaround to achieve this   The ideas are     to dump all the file name containing the deserved string to a txt1 txt  dump all the file name in the directory to a txt2 txt  make the difference between the 2 dump file with diff command   grep  foo    log   cut -c1-14   uniq  gt  txt1 txt grep     log   cut -c1-14   uniq  gt  txt2 txt diff txt1 txt txt2 txt   grep   gt

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

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