# use -r if you want to process recursively
grep -L 'N\+' your_directory | xargs cp --target-directory wherever
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perl -MFile::Find::Rule -le 'print for find(file =>
grep => qr/(?!N\+)/, in => @ARGV)' sourcedir | xargs \
cp --target-directory wherever
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broquaint

Many thanks for your suggestion and time. The grep --help command shows the following:

 -v, --invert-match        select non-matching lines
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I wish to copy files that do not contain NNNNNs. I am not doing it on a line by line basis. Also I don't understand what the program xargs does also xargs --help does not tell me much.

I wish to copy files that do not contain NNNNNs.

Ah yes, sorry you'll want the -L switch as nite_man mentioned. That will output all the files that did not match the criteria.

Also I don't understand what the program xargs does

It's roughly equivalent to

perl -e 'exec "@ARGV " . join " ", <>'
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So execute the given program and provided parameters and then add anything read from the pipe as arguments.
HTH

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broquaint

Why not just do it in Perl then?

• Are you worried about performance
• Do you want to be able to do it when Perl is not available
• Are you trying to add extra tools to your toolbelt

Personally if Perl will do it for me then I would use that and move on

cd /your/old/dir/
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cp `grep -rl 'NNNN' *` /your/new/dir/
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SV* sv_bless(SV* sv, HV* stash);

You have a small typo. I guess you meant this:

cd /your/old/dir/
cp `grep -rl 'NNNN' *` /your/new/dir/
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If one needs another solution for any reason, there is always a for loop:

for file in `grep -rl 'NNNN' *` ; do cp $file dstdir/ ; done
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Also, this will find files that contain match. Use "-L" in grep, if you want those files which do not contain match.

Leonid Mamtchenkov aka TVSET

I used grep -rL instead of l ..... because I want to copy files that do not contain the previously mentioned string. But the number of files seems to stop this command from working. Does anyone have more suggestions?

This is why another poster suggested xargs. xargs reads arguments from standard input, and executes a command with arguments. It chunks the input and repeats the command as required, to avoid going over any command-line-length limits of the shell.

Instead of just (xargs --help), try (man xargs) for some examples (search for EXAMPLES) and details.

--
[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

That is why broquaint used xargs. It runs a command for each argument (whitespace separated) it gets on its STDIN. Try reading man xargs

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flounder

Well, you are right about L but why doesn't grep -rL work? Maybe I didn't understand clearly but I checked this command and all are working correctly.

      
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SV* sv_bless(SV* sv, HV* stash);

The Unix way is to use find. (Though, of course, you're allowed to drop the backslashes and have it all on one line.) (It's a lot easier if the directory containing the files has no subdirectories.)

find $DIR                               \
   -exec egrep 'N+' {} > /dev/null\; -o \
   -exec cp {} $otherDir\;
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1 - Run the find command, starting the search at the required directory

3 - After the nodes above, everyone knows how to find the files which don't contain NNNN. Instead of feeding the names to xargs, we can also implement the action in find>. The return value of egrep is true if the pattern was found, false if it wasn't found, regardless of whether options reverse the send of the search.

3b - If the pattern matches the file, we want to stop there. That's what the -o option does. We only continue further if the pattern did NOT match anywhere in the file.

4 - Copy the file to the other directory.

Note: -exec takes an ordinary command with curly braces where you would have the name of the file, and an escaped semi-colon to mark the end of the -exec.

More Notes: If the directory has subdirectories, and you don't want to descend into them, it becomes more complicated. You want to -prune directories (-type d), but that stops the search with the first thing found, unless you search depth first (-deepth>) .