Find lines in file1.txt but not in file2.txt

grep -Fxvf file2.txt file1.txt

Find lines containing CJK characters from a file

grep --color=auto -P '.*\([^\x00-\x7f][^\x00-\x7f][^\x00-\x7f][^\x00-\x7f][^\x00-\x7f][^\x00-\x7f]\).* file.txt

Delete (really) empty lines

Delete (really) empty lines

grep . oldfile > newfile

or

grep ^$ oldfile > newfile

or, delete really empty lines and lines with only whitespace characters

grep -E ^[[:whitespace:]]*$ oldfile > newfile

Change }; to } in multiple files

grep -rl "};" *.m | xargs sed -i .bak -e 's/};/}/'

Remarks:

grep:

• -r recursively find

• -l list files matching text

• xargs construct argument list and execute utility

sed:

• -i .bak change in place but keep backup with extension .bak

• -e execute command, in this case, a regex substitution

After programmatically munging a text file, detect unexpectedly changed lines that don't match certain pattern

If the expected changes will have string1 and string2 and the unexpected ones should not have them, use diff to find the changesets

$ diff file1.txt file2.txt > diff12.txt

and find the ones that don't have string1 and string2

    $grep -vE -e '(^.*string2|string2.*$)|^---$|^[[:digit:]]+(,[[:digit:]]+)*c[[:digit:]]+(,[[:digit:]]+)*$' diff12.txt

If you only want to count how many such lines there are, do -vEc instead of -vE.

Remarks:

• -c: count but don't echo the matching lines

• -v: boolean negate the test

• -E: use POSIX extended regular expression

• ^---$|^[[:digit:]]+(,[[:digit:]]+)*c[[:digit:]]+(,[[:digit:]]+)*$ are used to match the lines "---" and "5918,5925c5918,5925" that diff generates for diff file1.txt file2.txt

Finding files that do not contain a given string

Find all files:

$ find . -type f -name "*.txt" > /tmp/all.txt

Find files that contain string foobar:

$ ack -l foobar > /tmp/positive.txt

Find the complement using grep:

$ grep -v -x -f /tmp/positive.txt /tmp/all.txt

Remarks:

• -v invert the matching, selecting non-matching cases;

• -x matches the entire line

• -f <file name> takes patterns from file.

Extract parts related to the -a option from man page of git

git help commit 10 | grep -B 1 -A 10 "\-a" | more