Submitted by John Bickar on October 2, 2017 - 3:11 pm
Today I learned about the -v flag for grep. The -v, or --invert-match, flag, returns all lines that do not match your regular expression.
Let's say you have a long list of items, and you want to narrow it down to the ones that are not orange. I have banged my head against trying to do this with sed multiple times (as my search history will attest), and it turns out to be so much easier with grep.
orange bicycle
orange sweater
green banana
orange basketball
blue bandana
orange you glad I stopped there?
orange sweater
green banana
orange basketball
blue bandana
orange you glad I stopped there?
If that list is in a file called list.txt, run:
grep -v "^orange" list.txt
and it will return:
green banana
blue bandana
blue bandana
Pretty spiffy!
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