How do I find files that do not contain a given string pattern?

Question

How do I find out the files in the current directory which do not contain the word foo (using grep)?

Answer 1

Take a look at ack. It does the .svn exclusion for you automatically, gives you Perl regular expressions, and is a simple download of a single Perl program.

The equivalent of what you're looking for should be, in ack:

ack -L foo