find with grep - not matching strings

smcelhinney · 19-06-2007 10:39AM #1

Right, I'm trying to find all the files in a directory which DONT contain a certain search term. This is in bash btw. (Cygwin actually.. yes I know, dont hate me, hate the machine..)

find . -name "*.htm" -exec grep -vq "foo" '{}' \; -print

is not working. What am I doing wrong..?

koloughlin · 19-06-2007 12:30PM

It looks like there's something wrong with grep -qv. Check this out:

[user@box ~]$ grep -qv "infile" file.txt
[user@box ~]$ echo $?
0
[user@box ~]$ grep -q "infile" file.txt
[user@box ~]$ echo $?
0
[user@box ~]$ grep -qv "notinfile" file.txt
[user@box ~]$ echo $?
0
[user@box ~]$ grep -q "notinfile" file.txt
[user@box ~]$ echo $?
1

I would have expected the first case above to return a 1 return code since infile is in file.txt, but it didn't work as expected. Feature or bug, who knows?

Could you just use grep?

grep -RL "foo" *.htm

smcelhinney · 25-06-2007 03:57PM

Hmm, that doesnt seem to recurse?!

Funny.. or not..

Khannie · 25-06-2007 05:54PM

do pipes work on cygwin?

find . -name "*.htm" | grep -v <pattern>

koloughlin · 25-06-2007 06:26PM

Khannie wrote:

do pipes work on cygwin?

find . -name "*.htm" | grep -v <pattern>

Wouldn't that search the path and filename, rather than actually open the file and search the contents of the file?

I'm pretty sure

grep -RL "foo" *.htm

will work. I tried it in cygwin and it does recurse through the filesystem.

find with grep - not matching strings

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