Regular expressions - "negating" a matching string

smcelhinney

I want to search and return files from a filesystem, that DONT contain a particular string. I need a little help.

My regex sucks, but I assumed that it would be something like !^foo or something like that?

am I way off?

marco_polo

smcelhinney wrote:

I want to search and return files from a filesystem, that DONT contain a particular string. I need a little help.

My regex sucks, but I assumed that it would be something like !^foo or something like that?

am I way off?

I think [^foo] would work to exclude this string. To the best of my limited knowledge on this subject the square brackets are important. I think ^foo without the brackets would match "foo" only if it occurs at the beginning of a line.

IRLConor

grep -Lr foo dir

will recursively search the directory dir and print the names of the files which do not match the regex foo.

What tool/language are you using?

[^foo] will not do it, that matches a single character which is anything except 'f' or 'o'.

Hobbes

Something to help you.
http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/cheat-sheets/regular-expressions-cheat-sheet/

koloughlin

This thread sounds very familiar

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055109333