File – How to Find Files That Do Not Contain a Given String Pattern

Try this:

grep -rl <string-to-match> | xargs grep -L <string-not-to-match>

Explanation: grep -lr makes grep recursively (r) output a list (l) of all files that contain <string-to-match>. xargs loops over these files, calling grep -L on each one of them. grep -L will only output the filename when the file does not contain <string-not-to-match>.

To print lines that do not contain some string, you use the -v flag:

grep -r -v "bar" . | grep -v "foo"

This gives you all lines that do not contain foo or bar.

To print files that do not contain some string, you use the -L flag. To non-match several strings, you can use regular expressions with the -P flag (there are several regex flags you can use):

grep -r -L -P "(foo|bar)" .

This prints a list of files that don't contain foo or bar.

Thanks to Anton Kovalenko for pointing this out.