Question

I’m a bit of a total beginner when it comes to programming and I appreciate all help you are willing to provide.

Here’s my problem…

I have a data.txt file with a lot of lines in it and a strings.txt that contains some strings (1 string per line).

I want to delete all lines from data.txt if they contain any string from strings.txt and to save that new file as proc_data.txt.

I know that I could use sed to search and delete for 1 or more strings but having 500+ strings to type in a CLI makes it … well, you know.

What I’ve tried so far

~$ for i in `cat strings.txt`; do sed '/${i}/d' data.txt -i.bak; done

but it just makes a backup of data.txt with the same size.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Use grep:

LC_ALL=C fgrep -v -f strings.txt data.txt >proc_data.txt

It searches all strings of strings.txt in data.txt with switch -f. Reverse the result adding -v. Redirect output to your desired file.