First question here, so go easy (:
I have a 385 files which are the result of simulations, named ###_result.dat. However, some of the results resulted in errors, which I can grep for using the -l flag since these files always contain the character “=”.
So getting the error-files is no problem:
grep -l = *_result.dat | wc -l 4
When I want to list the files without any errors, I thought I could just invert the grep using the v-flag:
grep -v -l = *_result.dat | wc -l 385 ls | wc -l 385
So this gives me all files, including the ones with errors.
What am I doing wrong here?
Now I know I could probably just throw out the bad ones and continue from there, but I’d like to know why this usage of grep doesn’t work for me.
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Answer
You should use grep -L. What you did here is find the files (-l) containing lines that do not (-v) match your pattern.