how do I invert a search with multiple patterns?

[zz5678]

For the following to be processed:

abc
efg
123

my command is:

rg -v ab -v 12

This command doesn't actually work, but the ChatGPT answer works like this.

Is there a feature like this? But I'm using it in wrong way?

[s-p-turner]

Fwiw, two alternative ways to achieve what you want would be either:

rg -v ab "input-file" | rg -v 12

or (more efficient):

rg -v 'ab|12' "input-file"

[zz5678]

Fwiw, two alternative ways to achieve what you want would be either:

rg -v ab "input-file" | rg -v 12

or (more efficient):

rg -v 'ab|12' "input-file"

Yes, the second method is more efficient, but it doesn't seem to appear in the man page of ripgrep

One question is, who told ChatGPT about the Way that doesn't exist????

[BurntSushi]

(I've converted this to a Discussion since this is more Q&A than anything else. I've also marked @s-p-turner's response as the answer. I'll provide a bit more context here.)

ripgrep's man page doesn't contain all possible forms of composition. Instead, it documents how to compose things. For example, multiple -e/--regexp flags can be given. The -v/--invert-match flag is a switch that applies to the overall search. The man page documents it as a flag that does not take a value, so your use here is erroneous.

I myself will use both rg -v 'foo|bar' or rg -v foo | rg -v bar, depending on the occasion. It just depends on what I'm doing. It's true that the latter is technically likely less efficient than the former, but it's unlikely to be noticeable in the vast majority of cases. Especially since pipelines like this tend to reduce the corpus size at each step, and thus, the marginal cost of an additional command in the pipeline gets lower and lower as the search is refined. Just write what is natural to you. And if it's too slow, then you can start looking at ways to speed it up.

As for ChatGPT, I don't know why it says the things it does. If you want to talk ChatGPT, please do that somewhere else.