Question

How do I recursively view a list of files that has one string and specifically doesn’t have another string? Also, I mean to evaluate the text of the files, not the filenames.

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Conclusion:

As per comments, I ended up using:

find . -name "*.html" -exec grep -lR 'base\-maps' {} \; | xargs grep -L 'base\-maps\-bot'

This returned files with “base-maps” and not “base-maps-bot”. Thank you!!

Answer 1

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>.