Using grep to find files that doesn't contain a given string pattern

Question

I'm using the following command in my web application to find all files in the current directory that contain the string foo (leaving out svn directories).

find .  -not  -ipath '.*svn*' -exec  grep -H -E -o  "foo"  {} \; > grep_results.txt

How do I find out the files that doesn't contain the word foo?

Answer 1

$man grep

-v, --invert-match

Invert the sense of matching, to select non-matching lines.

Answer 2

Use grep's -v flag :)

Answer 3

Ok....the inverse matching on grep is -v, have you tried that?

Answer 4

If your grep has the -L option:

$ grep -L "foo" *

Answer 5

Finally I got it right using this as suggested by a friend:

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

It gives me all the files that has zero match for foo :)

Answer 6

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"

Answer 7

Your friend was "sort of" right. You will actually need:

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

Otherwise, you will get hits on files that have 10 lines w/ "foo", files that have 100 lines w/ "foo", etc. as well as lines that have a "0" in the filename like "my_10_best_friends.txt".

Answer 8

Please take a look at ack at http://betterthangrep.com/. It does the .svn exclusion for you automatically, gives you Perl regexes, and is a simple download of a single Perl program. The equivalent of what you're looking for should be, in ack:

ack -v foo