view content of files from grep -L

Question

I use grep -L to get a list of files that do not contain a certain string. How can I see the content of those files? Just like:

grep -L "pattern" | cat

Answer 1

You can use xargs:

grep -L "pattern" | xargs cat

As read in man xargs --> build and execute command lines from standard input. So it will cat to those file names that grep -L returns.

Answer 2

You can use cat and use the output of grep -L...

cat $(grep -L "pattern" *.files )