Comment on #19941 Is there a way to only run tests with a certain dependency? Discussion answered by kaos I think you were pretty close, as there is no advanced search/filtering built into Pants. Perhaps something like:

$ pants dependents --transitive <some dependency> | sort > tgts-depending-on-some-dep.specs
$ pants list :: | sort > all.specs
$ comm -1 -3 some-deps.specs all.specs > tgts-not-depending-on-some-dep.specs

Then you can use the two

tgts-..specs

files as needed with subsequent runs:

$ pants --spec-files=tgts-not-depending-on-some-dep.specs test
# etc..

pantsbuild/pants