How to delete all lines that do NOT contain a certain word in Vim?

vim regex find-and-replace

94,501

Solution 1

You can use

:g!/price/d

to delete every line that doesn't contain "price"

As answered below, g! is an alias to v. this is equivalent to

:v/price/d

Solution 2

You can also use:

:v/price/d

to delete lines.

Solution 3

%!grep "price"

is another option that can be considerably faster than :v for large files.

Tested on Vim 7.4, Ubuntu 14.04, 1M line log file.

Lines that contain word: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1725265/how-can-i-delete-all-lines-that-do-not-begin-with-certain-characters/42714334#42714334

94,501

digitaljoel

Professional Java programmer since 2000 working with Spring, JPA, hibernate, maven, and other related technologies. Also an AKKI Kenpo black belt.

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

digitaljoel over 1 year
In vim I can delete all lines that contain the word "price" with this
```
:g /price/d
```
How can I delete all lines that do NOT contain the word "price"?
- Mu Mind over 8 years
  
  Can this question be migrated to vi.stackexchange.com? I tried to flag it for migration but couldn't figure it out.
- 8bittree over 6 years
  
  @MuMind It's on topic here, so no need to migrate. "Don't migrate for the sake of migration. We only migrate questions because they are off-topic on the original site. It is perfectly possible for a question to be on-topic on multiple sites, but that is not a reason to migrate it elsewhere, unless the OP requests migration." Also, only SE employees can migrate after 60 days and it's very rare that they will (not even moderators can migrate an old question).
digitaljoel about 13 years

I knew it would be easy...
Chris Johnsen about 13 years

:g! is also known as :v (akin to grep -v).
hippietrail over 11 years

What does the % do?
Heptite over 11 years

% is a special range in this context that means the whole file. See :help cmdline-ranges.
stillanoob about 5 years

% is optional since the default range is the entire buffer.
vjalle about 5 years

Fwiw -- Looks like g is for "global" and v for "inverse" (if you believe what you read on vim.famdom).
Paddy3118 almost 5 years

help :v in vim confirms it
Bob60506 over 4 years

The percetage sign is redundant. The "g" already selects all lines. A simple :g!/price/d will delete all lines without "price" in them.
zardilior about 2 years

Super fast and a marvelous solution