How can I exclude one word with grep?

Question

I need something like:

grep ^\"unwanted_word\"XXXXXXXX

Answer 1

grep provides '-v' or '--invert-match' option to select non-matching lines.

e.g.

grep -v 'unwanted_pattern' file_name

This will output all the lines from file file_name, which does not have 'unwanted_pattern'.

If you are searching the pattern in multiple files inside a folder, you can use the recursive search option as follows

grep -r 'wanted_pattern' * | grep -v 'unwanted_pattern'

Here grep will try to list all the occurrences of 'wanted_pattern' in all the files from within currently directory and pass it to second grep to filter out the 'unwanted_pattern'. '|' - pipe will tell shell to connect the standard output of left program (grep -r 'wanted_pattern' *) to standard input of right program (grep -v 'unwanted_pattern').