top of page

LITIGATION SUPPORT TIP OF THE NIGHT

The views expressed in this blog are those of the owner and do not reflect the views or opinions of the owner’s employer. All content provided on this blog is for informational purposes only. The owner of this blog makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site. The owner will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information nor for the availability of this information. The owner will not be liable for any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information. This policy is subject to change at any time. The owner is not an attorney, and nothing posted on this site should be construed as legal advice. Litigation Support Tip of the Night does not provide confirmation that any e-discovery technique or conduct is compliant with legal, regulatory, contractual or ethical requirements.

See my post on Running Regex Searches With a Grep Utility on the ILTA litigation support blog.

New tips for paralegals and litigation support profesionals are posted to this site each week. Click on the blog headings for better detail.

See How-To Videos on my YouTube channel.

regex search to find files not containing a string

Sean O'Shea
Feb 18, 2023
1 min read

You can run a regular expression search which will find any files which do not contain a word or phrase that you designate.

In this example we have a set of text files, only one of which contains the word, 'panda'.

Using a text editor like NotePad ++ we run the following search to locate any files which do not have this string:

(?s)\A((?!panda).)+\z

. . . use the option to Find All using the Find in Files tool, and only the files in the folder in which you search which do not contain the string will be listed in the results pane.