Question

Hi I’m looking for a regular expression for: line of text that does not end with a certain word, let’s say it’s “abcd”
At first I tried with

.*[^abcd]$
That one doesn’t work of course. It matches a line that doesn’t end with any of the letters a,b,c or d.
So, in Advanced Grep Topics, I found this expression, but couldn’t get it to work:

^(?>.*)(?<=abcd)
->
grep -e "^(?>.*)(?<=abcd)$"

Any idea for the expression I need?

Answer 1

Have a look at grep‘s -v option

grep -v 'abcd$'

If you really meant word rather that just "sequence of characters" then use

grep -v '\babcd$'

\b meaning "word-boundary"