Waiting for Go-done

A coworker called this morning wanting to know how to get a list of files that do not contain the text 'Program complete' on any line. They run jobs in big batches, and each process writes its output to a separate file. The running times vary, and they wanted an easy way to see at a glance which processes are still running.

Running grep -v will print all lines that don't match the given pattern, but that doesn't help in this case because we want to treat the output files as though each contained a single line.

With the -c option, grep outputs the number of lines that matched. Say we have outputs named output1 through output4, and the odd-numbered jobs are finished. This would give us

$ grep -c 'Program complete' output*
output1:1
output2:0
output3:1
output4:0

The pattern requires quotes because it contains a space. Without the quotes, grep would search for Program in files named complete, output1, and so on.

The outputs for the processes still running are the ones containing zero matches, so let's look for those:

$ grep -c 'Program complete' output* | grep ':0$'
output2:0
output4:0

Remember that a dollar sign in a regular expression anchors the match to the end.

Quick cleanup with sed gives us the names of the outputs (backslash is the shell's line-continuation marker that lets us split long lines):

$ grep -c 'Program complete' output* | \
  grep ':0$' | \
  sed -e 's/:0$//'
output2
output4

UPDATE: Turns out there's a much easier way to do it. GNU grep has a --files-without-match option (aka -L), so the command is the simple

$ grep -L 'Program complete' output*
output2
output4