Many thanks for your suggestion and time. The grep --help command shows the following: 
 -v, --invert-match        select non-matching lines

[download]
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.

In reply to Re: Re: grep or perl by Anonymous Monk
in thread grep or perl by Anonymous Monk

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