Re: Using vimgrep to find files NOT containing a string

Marius Gedminas wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 02, 2020 at 07:14:37PM +0000, russurquhart1 via vim_use wrote:
> > I generally use:
> >
> > :vim `beta: ` **/*.md | copen
> >
> > To traverse my Markdown files to find those containing 'beta: '.
> >
> > I need to do the opposite but can get the pattern right. I tried
> >
> > :vim -v `beta: ` **/*.md | copen
> >
> > thinking that might work but no dice.
> >
> > I looked through teh vimgrep help but couldn't find anything.
> >
> > Does anyone know how to do this?
>
> Not with vimgrep, but on the command line to find files that don't
> contain a pattern I generally do
>
> grep -c "beta: " **/*.md | grep ':0$' | sed -e 's/:0$//'
>
> this assumes your shell can do ** and it's probably not the most
> elegant/efficient way of doing it, but it's one that I can remember how
> to spell.
>
> And then I opened the grep manual page to see if there's an easier way,
> and lo and behold:
>
> -L, --files-without-match
> Suppress normal output; instead print the name of each
> input file from which no output would normally have been
> printed. The scanning will stop on the first match.
>
> Just what the doctor ordered!

Not exactly. This switches from reporting matches to reporting file
names with matches. The output won't be parsed properly.

> To feed these files to to vim you could play with temporarily setting
> 'grepprg', or use :args `grep -L "beta: " **/*.md`
>
> If your shell doesn't do **, you may need to use something a bit more
> complicated like
>
> find -name '*.md' -exec grep -L "beta: " {} +

The grep program has a long list of options, I don't think we will
want to add them all to :vimgrep. Especially if it's about listing
files with/without matches, there are several other ways to do that.

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