regex : does not begin by "pattern"

I have a lot of lines in my LIST file and want to list only lines whose name does not start by (or contains) "git".

So far I have :

cat LIST | grep ^[^g]

but I would like something like :

#not starting by "git"
cat LIST | grep ^[^(git)]
#not containing "git"
cat LIST | grep .*[^(git)].*

but it is not correct. What regex should I use ?

5 Answers

Using grep in this case with -P option, which Interprets the PATTERN as a Perl regular expression

grep -P '^(?:(?!git).)*$' LIST

Regular expression explanation:

^ the beginning of the string (?: group, but do not capture (0 or more times) (?! look ahead to see if there is not: git 'git' ) end of look-ahead . any character except \n )* end of grouping
$ before an optional \n, and the end of the string

Using the find command

find . \! -iname "git*"

4

Since the OP is looking for a general regex and not specially for grep, this is the general regex for lines not starting with "git".

^(?!git).*

Breakdown:

^ beginning of line

(?!git) not followed by 'git'

.* followed by 0 or more characters

If you want to simply list all lines that don't contain git try this

 cat LIST | grep -v git

3

Slight modification to the accepted answer that will work in more situations and a broader swath of engines (moves . to outside second closing parenthesis):

^(?:(?!git)).*$

This example finds any lines that begin with anything except git or ls:

^(?:(?!git|ls)).*$

1

If you wanna find the lines "not starting with git", you could also use:

^[^git].*

3

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