I want to find a word in strings, but only if it doesn't begin with a prefix.
for example.
I'd like to find all the appearances of APP_PERFORM_TASK, but only if they are not starting with a prefix of CMD_DO("
so,
CMD_DO("APP_PERFORM_TASK") <- OK (i don't need to know about this)
BLAH("APP_PERFORM_TASK") <-- NOT OK, this should match my search.
I tried:
(?!CMD_DO\(")APP_PERFORM_TASK
But that doesn't produce the results I need. What I doing wrong?
Here's a quick way:
Use the --invert-match (also known as -v) flag to ignore CMD_DO and pipe the results to a second grep that only matches BLAH:
grep -v CMD_DO dummy | grep BLAH
Based on your comment: Let's concentrate on command line tool grep
Here is grep solution without using -P switch (perl like regex):
grep 'APP_PERFORM_TASK' file | grep -v '^CMD_DO("'
Here is grep solution using -P switch and negative lokbehind:
grep -P '(?<!^CMD_DO\(")APP_PERFORM_TASK' file
Try this
(?!CMD_DO\(").*APP_PERFORM_TASK.*
To handle an input line with both the desirable and undesirable forms like:
CMD_DO("APP_PERFORM_TASK") BLAH("APP_PERFORM_TASK")
you'd need something like this in awk (using GNU awk for gensub()):
awk -v s="APP_PERFORM_TASK" 'gensub("CMD_DO\\(\\""s,"","") ~ s' file
i.e. get rid of all of the unwanted occurrences of the string then test whats left.
An awk version
awk '/APP_PERFORM_TASK/ && !/^CMD_DO/' file
iflag and see what happens ;)