Overview

I am embarrassed to admit this, but I have never used a regex exclusion [^...] before. Regular expressions have been a part of my career for as far back as I can remember. I actually thought I had a pretty solid understanding of all the options available. But, exclusions… I somehow missed them.

With this construct we can find everything EXCEPT <insert pattern match here>, by using the exception [^...] character class.

Examples

Search the string a for all characters, EXCEPT a, b, c, d, e, f (no match):

jemurray@mbp-2019:~ $ echo "a" | grep '[^abcdef]'

Repeat the same type of search again, this time for the character z which is not on the exclusion list [^abcdef]. A match is found:

jemurray@mbp-2019:~ $ echo "z" | grep '[^abcdef]'
z