Grep Find Recursive – How to Find Files That Do NOT Contain a Text String

findgreprecursive

What concise command can I use to find all files that do NOT contain a text string?

I tried this (using -v to invert grep's parameters) with no luck:

find . -exec grep -v -l shared.php {} \;

Someone said this would work:

find . ! -exec grep -l shared.php {} \;

But it does not seem to work for me.

This page has this example:

find ./logs -size +1c  > t._tmp
while read filename
do
     grep -q "Process Complete" $filename
     if [ $? -ne 0 ] ; then
             echo $filename
     fi
done < t._tmp
rm -f t_tmp

But that's cumbersome and not at all concise.

ps: I know that grep -L * will do this, but how can I use the find command in combination with grep to excluded files is what I really want to know.

pss: Also I'm not sure how to have grep include subdirectories with the grep -L * syntax, but I still want to know how to use it with find 🙂

Best Answer

find . -type f | xargs grep -H -c 'shared.php' | grep 0$ | cut -d':' -f1

find . -type f -exec grep -H -c 'shared.php' {} \; | grep 0$ | cut -d':' -f1

Here we are calculating number of matching lines(using -c) in a file if the count is 0 then its the required file, so we cut the first column i.e. filename from the output.

Related Solutions

Shell Find – Locate Directories Without Subdirectories

You don't need to use awk at all. Use the built-in tests that ksh provides, something like this:

#!/bin/ksh

for NAME in *
do
    FOUND=no
    if [[ -d $NAME && $NAME != '.' && $NAME != '..' ]]
    then
        for SUBNAME in $NAME/*
        do
            if [[ -d $SUBNAME ]]
            then
                FOUND=yes
                break
            fi
        done
        if [[ $FOUND == no ]]
        then
            echo Found only files in $NAME
        fi
    fi
done

That little script looks in all the directories in the current directory, and tells you if they only contain files, no sub-directories.

Bash – find files not matching list of filename patterns

Since you mention Perl...

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Find qw{find};

my %patterns;
while (<>) {
  chomp;
  $patterns{$_}++;
}

die "No pattern supplied\n" unless keys %patterns;

find( 
    sub{
           my $matches_a_pattern=0;
           for my $pattern (keys %patterns){
               my $glob_pattern = $pattern;
               for($glob_pattern){
                   s/\./\\./g;
                   s/\*/.*/g;
                   s/\?/./g;
               }
               $matches_a_pattern++ if ( /\Q$pattern\E/ or /$glob_pattern/);
           }

           print "$File::Find::name\n" unless $matches_a_pattern;
     }
    , '.' )

Invoke this as

/path/to/my/script file_with_patterns

Replace the . at the end with the top of the tree you want to walk.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Shell Find – Locate Directories Without Subdirectories

Bash – find files not matching list of filename patterns

Related Question