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 " ", <>'

[download]
So execute the given program and provided parameters and then add anything read from the pipe as arguments.
HTH

_________
broquaint

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

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