Feature request: --files-without-matches

[mernen]

One flag that occasionally comes useful is to identify files that don't match a certain expression. Both ag and ack have -L/--files-without-matches (effectively the opposite of -l/--files-with-matches).

One minor problem here is that rg -L is already taken for following symlinks.

Curiously, ag -lv appears to be a synonym of -L. I'm not sure whether this is intentional or not, but it seems like a perfectly reasonable approach to me — in fact, years ago, before I knew of -L, this is actually what I first tried with ack, and got bogus results (it interprets this combo as "list all files that have at least one line that does not match the given expression", like ripgrep does today). Personally, I don't think I've ever had a use case for this.

[BurntSushi]

I'm not opposed to adding --files-without-matches, but I don't think we need to add a short alias for it. I'd at least like to keep -L for following symlinks.

I'm also not opposed to making -v a bit smarter with respect to whether -l is given or not, but I worry that it will make "find files with a line that doesn't match" impossible to do.

[andyleejordan]

Ha, I almost added this earlier @mernen but ran into exactly the problem you described 😄

[BurntSushi]

OK, so I did some more thinking about this and I think the current behavior of -lv is probably the right one. I totally get that it can be confusing, but -v pretty solidly refers to matching at the line level and isn't a generic "do the opposite" flag. In particular, grep -lv behaves the same as rg -lv.

Here is a proposed specification.

Add a new flag --files-without-matches. Only show the path of each file that contains zero matches.

[hauntsaninja]

(If, like me, you're coming here from Google, the flag that made it into ripgrep is --files-without-match)

[sankalp-khare]

I keep coming back here to re-check what the flag is 😢

[jeremyfiel]

how can we use this flag in vs code search?

[BurntSushi]

This is the issue tracker for ripgrep. Your question is about VS Code UX. You are in the wrong place.