Finding all semicolons not preceded by backslash

Question

I'm really struggling to figure out how to find all occurrences of a semicolon not preceded by a backslash. I'm hoping to find a quick vim command to clean up long bash commands that I've opened with fc -e vim. Usually I can just do a regular find semicolon and replace with semicolon then new line to split my commands onto separate lines to make my script more readable. In this case I have a find -exec command in there which ends with \; but is then piped into another command. I want this to all be on one line. I know it would be quick to do by hand but I'm trying to learn vim better. I've tried all kinds of things but from my understanding the following should work:

:%s/\(\\;\)\@<!;/;^M/g

But it catches the \; in my find command as well. I would appreciate one of you pros pointing out what I'm missing here. Thank you.

Answer 1

this regex should match what you want

/\(^\|[^\\]\)\zs;/

Broken down: /\(^\|[^\\]\)\zs;/ 122222222222233345 aabccdeeefgg

1 : /       start the search
2 : \(...\) group what to match first (consists of a...g)
  a: \(  begin a group (kind of making an atom)
  b: ^   start of line
  c: \|  or
  d: [   start a character class
  e: ^\\ elements of the class are all but \ (^ negates here)
  f: ]   end the character class
  g: \)  end of group
3 : \zs  set the search-start
4 : ;    what to search for
5 : /    end the search