[SOLVED] Using grep with negative look-ahead returning no matches

Issue

So I am writing a few scripts for migrating SVN to GIT, we have a bunch of "old" branches in SVN that still exist but don't need to be moved to GIT. (Branches which happened to have already been merged to trunk). After a bit of google-fu I've come up with the following:

$(git for-each-ref --format='%(refname:short)' --merged origin/trunk | grep '(?!origin\/trunk)origin\/.*')

To be passed to

git branch -D --remote _previouscommandgoeshere_

If I run just git for-each-ref --format='%(refname:short)' --merged origin/trunk I get the following output:

origin/IR1091
origin/IR1102
origin/IR1105
...
origin/IR932
origin/Software
origin/trunk
origin/trunk@6792
origin/trunk@6850

When I add the grep command I get 0 values.

However, https://regexr.com/3ot1t has thaught me that my regexp is doing exactly what I want to do. Remove all branches except for the trunk branch.

What is wrong with the regexp/grep? (note I am not a linux/grep guru. This is all done in bash that comes with windows git)

Solution

The regexp is right, but grep by default does not support PCRE expression constructs like Negative look-ahead (?!. You need to enable the -P flag to enable the PCRE library, without that it just supports the Basic Regular Expression engine

.. | grep -oP '(?!origin\/trunk)origin\/.*'

Or use a perl regex match on the command line for which no flags need to be set up

.. | perl -ne 'print if /(?!origin\/trunk)origin\/.*/'

Answered By - Inian

Answer Checked By - Marilyn (WPSolving Volunteer)