It would be useful for me to identify files NOT containing certain patterns, eg files missing an initiation or configuration string, or that kind of thing.

I initially thought I could do this with grep -vl, but no dice. It doesn't work, because grep -vl compares line by line, so if any LINE doesn't contain the pattern, the file is flagged as not containing the pattern.

I tracked down a script called grepcat which supposedly does what I want (haven't tried it).

Seems a bit kludgy to me though, and a good candidate for doing in perl instead.

So, anybody got a quickie perl script to do the OPPOSITE of grep? I just want the filenames, not the non matching lines. Should work as follows

hartman@ds0207:~/filesContainingArena> find | xargs -ti cat {}
cat .
cat: .: Ist ein Verzeichnis
cat ./a
a
cat ./b
b
a
cat ./c
c
a
hartman@ds0207:~/filesContainingArena> antigrep.pl c * # should return
+ files not containing c, eg a and b, but not c.
bash: antigrep.pl: command not found
hartman@ds0207:~/filesContainingArena> grep -vl c * #unfortunately thi
+s doesn't work
a
b
c
hartman@ds0207:~/filesContainingArena>
[download]

Alternatively, I should be able to do antigrep with

find | xargs antigrep.pl I'd really like to do this in a one-liner, but can't quite think how.

Much obliged!