This overrides the --context flag.

This overrides the --context flag.

Forceful block buffering can be disabled with --no-block-buffered. Note that using --no-block-buffered causes ripgrep to revert to its default behavior of automatically detecting the buffering strategy. To force line buffering, use the --line-buffered flag.

If ripgrep does transcoding, then the byte offset is in terms of the the result of transcoding and not the original data. This applies similarly to another transformation on the source, such as decompression or a --pre filter. Note that when the PCRE2 regex engine is used, then UTF-8 transcoding is done by default.

This overrides the -i/--ignore-case and -S/--smart-case flags.

The possible values for this flag are:

never    Colors will never be used.
auto     The default. ripgrep tries to be smart.
always   Colors will always be used regardless of where output is sent.
ansi     Like 'always', but emits ANSI escapes (even in a Windows console).

When the --vimgrep flag is given to ripgrep, then the default value for the --color flag changes to never.

The format of the flag is {type}:{attribute}:{value}. {type} should be one of path, line, column or match. {attribute} can be fg, bg or style. {value} is either a color (for fg and bg) or a text style. A special format, {type}:none, will clear all color settings for {type}.

For example, the following command will change the match color to magenta and the background color for line numbers to yellow:

rg --colors 'match:fg:magenta' --colors 'line:bg:yellow' foo.

Extended colors can be used for {value} when the terminal supports ANSI color sequences. These are specified as either x (256-color) or x,x,x (24-bit truecolor) where x is a number between 0 and 255 inclusive. x may be given as a normal decimal number or a hexadecimal number, which is prefixed by 0x.

For example, the following command will change the match background color to that represented by the rgb value (0,128,255):

rg --colors 'match:bg:0,128,255'

or, equivalently,

rg --colors 'match:bg:0x0,0x80,0xFF'

Note that the the intense and nointense style flags will have no effect when used alongside these extended color codes.

This flag can be disabled with --no-column.

This overrides both the -B/--before-context and -A/--after-context flags.

If only one file is given to ripgrep, then only the count is printed if there is a match. The --with-filename flag can be used to force printing the file path in this case.

This overrides the --count-matches flag. Note that when --count is combined with --only-matching, then ripgrep behaves as if --count-matches was given.

If only one file is given to ripgrep, then only the count is printed if there is a match. The --with-filename flag can be used to force printing the file path in this case.

This overrides the --count flag. Note that when --count is combined with --only-matching, then ripgrep behaves as if --count-matches was given.

Principally, this permits $ in regex patterns to match just before CRLF instead of just before LF. The underlying regex engine may not support this natively, so ripgrep will translate all instances of $ to (?:\r??$). This may produce slightly different than desired match offsets. It is intended as a work-around until the regex engine supports this natively.

CRLF support can be disabled with --no-crlf.

The --debug flag is generally useful for figuring out why ripgrep skipped searching a particular file. The debug messages should mention all files skipped and why they were skipped.

To get even more debug output, use the --trace flag, which implies --debug along with additional trace data. With --trace, the output could be quite large and is generally more useful for development.

The argument accepts the same size suffixes as allowed in with the --max-filesize flag.

This flag can be disabled with --no-encoding.

A line is printed if and only if it matches at least one of the patterns.

This overrides --files-without-match.

This overrides --files-with-matches.

This flag can be disabled with --no-fixed-strings.

This flag can be disabled with --no-follow.

This overrides the --no-heading flag.

This flag can be disabled with --no-hidden.

This flag overrides -s/--case-sensitive and -S/--smart-case.

If you are looking for a way to include or exclude files and directories directly on the command line, then used -g instead.

When this flag is provided, ripgrep will emit a sequence of messages, each encoded as a JSON object, where there are five different message types:

begin - A message that indicates a file is being searched and contains at least one match.

end - A message the indicates a file is done being searched. This message also include summary statistics about the search for a particular file.

match - A message that indicates a match was found. This includes the text and offsets of the match.

context - A message that indicates a contextual line was found. This includes the text of the line, along with any match information if the search was inverted.

summary - The final message emitted by ripgrep that contains summary statistics about the search across all files.

Since file paths or the contents of files are not guaranteed to be valid UTF-8 and JSON itself must be representable by a Unicode encoding, ripgrep will emit all data elements as objects with one of two keys: text or bytes. text is a normal JSON string when the data is valid UTF-8 while bytes is the base64 encoded contents of the data.

The JSON Lines format is only supported for showing search results. It cannot be used with other flags that emit other types of output, such as --files, --files-with-matches, --files-without-match, --count or --count-matches. ripgrep will report an error if any of the aforementioned flags are used in concert with --json.

Other flags that control aspects of the standard output such as --only-matching, --heading, --replace, --max-columns, etc., have no effect when --json is set.

A more complete description of the JSON format used can be found here: https://docs.rs/grep-printer/*/grep_printer/struct.JSON.html

The JSON Lines format can be disabled with --no-json.

Forceful line buffering can be disabled with --no-line-buffered. Note that using --no-line-buffered causes ripgrep to revert to its default behavior of automatically detecting the buffering strategy. To force block buffering, use the --block-buffered flag.

This overrides the --word-regexp flag.

When this flag is omitted or is set to 0, then it has no effect.

For example, rg --max-depth 0 dir/ is a no-op because dir/ will not be descended into. rg --max-depth 1 dir/ will search only the direct children of dir.

The input format accepts suffixes of K, M or G which correspond to kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes, respectively. If no suffix is provided the input is treated as bytes.

Examples: --max-filesize 50K or --max-filesize 80M

Memory map searching doesn’t currently support all options, so if an incompatible option (e.g., --context) is given with --mmap, then memory maps will not be used.

Note that ripgrep may abort unexpectedly when --mmap if it searches a file that is simultaneously truncated.

This flag overrides --no-mmap.

When multiline mode is enabled, ripgrep will lift the restriction that a match cannot include a line terminator. For example, when multiline mode is not codepoint other than \n. Similarly, the regex \n is explicitly forbidden, and if you try to use it, ripgrep will return an error. However, when multiline and regexes like \n are permitted.

An important caveat is that multiline mode does not change the match semantics of .. Namely, in most regex matchers, a . will by default match any character other than \n, and this is true in ripgrep as well. In order to make . match \n, you must enable the "dot all" flag inside the regex. For example, both (?s). and (?s:.) have the same semantics, where . will match any character, including \n. Alternatively, the --multiline-dotall flag may be passed to make the "dot all" behavior the default. This flag only applies when multiline search is enabled.

There is no limit on the number of the lines that a single match can span.

WARNING: Because of how the underlying regex engine works, multiline searches may be slower than normal line-oriented searches, and they may also use more memory. In particular, when multiline mode is enabled, ripgrep requires that each file it searches is laid out contiguously in memory (either by reading it onto the heap or by memory-mapping it). Things that cannot be memory-mapped (such as stdin) will be consumed until EOF before searching can begin. In general, ripgrep will only do these things when necessary. Specifically, if the --multiline flag is provided but the regex does not contain patterns that would match \n characters, then ripgrep will automatically avoid reading each file into memory before searching it. Nevertheless, if you only care about matches spanning at most one line, then it is always better to disable multiline mode.

This flag can be disabled with --no-multiline.

Normally, a . will match any character except newlines. While this behavior typically isn’t relevant for line-oriented matching (since matches can span at most one line), this can be useful when searching with the -U/--multiline flag. By default, the multiline mode runs without this flag.

This flag is generally intended to be used in an alias or your ripgrep config file if you prefer "dot all" semantics by default. Note that regardless of whether this flag is used, "dot all" semantics can still be controlled via inline flags in the regex pattern itself, e.g., (?s:.) always enables "dot all" whereas (?-s:.) always disables "dot all".

This flag can be disabled with --no-multiline-dotall.

If ripgrep ever grows a feature to automatically read configuration files in pre-defined locations, then this flag will also disable that behavior as well.

This flag overrides --with-filename.

This overrides the --heading flag.

This flag can be disabled with the --ignore flag.

This flag can be disabled with the --ignore-global flag.

This flag can be disabled with the --ignore-messages flag.

This flag can be disabled with the --ignore-parent flag.

This flag can be disabled with the --ignore-vcs flag.

This flag can be disabled with the --messages flag.

This flag overrides --mmap.

When PCRE2’s Unicode mode is enabled, several different types of patterns become Unicode aware. This includes \b, \B, \w, \W, \d, \D, \s and \S. Similarly, the . meta character will match any Unicode codepoint instead of any byte. Caseless matching will also use Unicode simple case folding instead of ASCII-only case insensitivity.

Unicode mode in PCRE2 represents a critical trade off in the user experience of ripgrep. In particular, unlike the default regex engine, PCRE2 does not support the ability to search possibly invalid UTF-8 with Unicode features enabled. Instead, PCRE2 requires that everything it searches when Unicode mode is enabled is valid UTF-8. (Or valid UTF-16/UTF-32, but for the purposes of ripgrep, we only discuss UTF-8.) This means that if you have PCRE2’s Unicode mode enabled and you attempt to search invalid UTF-8, then the search for that file will halt and print an error. For this reason, when PCRE2’s Unicode mode is enabled, ripgrep will automatically "fix" invalid UTF-8 sequences by replacing them with the Unicode replacement codepoint.

If you would rather see the encoding errors surfaced by PCRE2 when Unicode mode is enabled, then pass the --no-encoding flag to disable all transcoding.

Related flags: --pcre2

This flag can be disabled with --pcre2-unicode.

This is useful when searching large binary files that would otherwise have very long lines if \n were used as the line terminator. In particular, ripgrep requires that, at a minimum, each line must fit into memory. Using NUL instead can be a useful stopgap to keep memory requirements low and avoid OOM (out of memory) conditions.

This is also useful for processing NUL delimited data, such as that emitted when using ripgrep’s -0/--null flag or find’s --print0 flag.

Using this flag implies -a/--text.

Note that this applies to each path argument given to ripgrep. For example, in the command rg --one-file-system /foo/bar /quux/baz, ripgrep will search both /foo/bar and /quux/baz even if they are on different file systems, but will not cross a file system boundary when traversing each path’s directory tree.

This is similar to find’s -xdev or -mount flag.

This flag can be disabled with --no-one-file-system.

Another way to achieve a similar effect is by modifying your pattern to match the empty string. For example, if you are searching using rg foo then using rg "^|foo" instead will emit every line in every file searched, but only occurrences of foo will be highlighted. This flag enables the same behavior without needing to modify the pattern.

This is generally useful when you want to use features such as look-around or backreferences.

Note that PCRE2 is an optional ripgrep feature. If PCRE2 wasn’t included in your build of ripgrep, then using this flag will result in ripgrep printing an error message and exiting.

Related flags: --no-pcre2-unicode

This flag can be disabled with --no-pcre2.

WARNING: When this flag is set, ripgrep will unconditionally spawn a
process for every file that is searched. Therefore, this can incur an
unnecessarily large performance penalty if you don't otherwise need the
flexibility offered by this flag.

A preprocessor is not run when ripgrep is searching stdin.

When searching over sets of files that may require one of several decoders as preprocessors, COMMAND should be a wrapper program or script which first classifies FILE based on magic numbers/content or based on the FILE name and then dispatches to an appropriate preprocessor. Each COMMAND also has its standard input connected to FILE for convenience.

For example, a shell script for COMMAND might look like:

case "$1" in
*.pdf)
    exec pdftotext "$1" -
    ;;
*)
    case $(file "$1") in
    *Zstandard*)
        exec pzstd -cdq
        ;;
    *)
        exec cat
        ;;
    esac
    ;;
esac

The above script uses pdftotext to convert a PDF file to plain text. For all other files, the script uses the file utility to sniff the type of the file based on its contents. If it is a compressed file in the Zstandard format, then pzstd is used to decompress the contents to stdout.

This overrides the -z/--search-zip flag.

This flag is useful when searching many files with the --pre flag. Namely, it permits the ability to avoid process overhead for files that don’t need preprocessing. For example, given the following shell script, pre-pdftotext:

#!/bin/sh

pdftotext "$1" -

then it is possible to use --pre pre-pdftotext --pre-glob '*.pdf' to make it so ripgrep only executes the pre-pdftotext command on files with a .pdf extension.

Multiple --pre-glob flags may be used. Globbing rules match .gitignore globs. Precede a glob with a ! to exclude it.

This flag has no effect if the --pre flag is not used.

When --files is used, then ripgrep will stop finding files after finding the first file that matches all ignore rules.

The argument accepts the same size suffixes as allowed in the --max-filesize flag.

For example, to search for the literal -foo, you can use this flag:

rg -e -foo

You can also use the special -- delimiter to indicate that no more flags will be provided. Namely, the following is equivalent to the above:

rg -- -foo

Capture group indices (e.g., $5) and names (e.g., $foo) are supported in the replacement string.

Note that the replacement by default replaces each match, and NOT the entire line. To replace the entire line, you should match the entire line.

This flag can be used with the -o/--only-matching flag.

This flag can be disabled with --no-search-zip.

This overrides the -s/--case-sensitive and -i/--ignore-case flags.

path        Sort by file path.
modified    Sort by the last modified time on a file.
accessed    Sort by the last accessed time on a file.
created     Sort by the cretion time on a file.
none        Do not sort results.

If the sorting criteria isn’t available on your system (for example, creation time is not available on ext4 file systems), then ripgrep will attempt to detect this and print an error without searching any results. Otherwise, the sort order is unspecified.

To sort results in reverse or descending order, use the --sortr flag. Also, this flag overrides --sortr.

Note that sorting results currently always forces ripgrep to abandon parallelism and run in a single thread.

path        Sort by file path.
modified    Sort by the last modified time on a file.
accessed    Sort by the last accessed time on a file.
created     Sort by the cretion time on a file.
none        Do not sort results.

If the sorting criteria isn’t available on your system (for example, creation time is not available on ext4 file systems), then ripgrep will attempt to detect this and print an error without searching any results. Otherwise, the sort order is unspecified.

To sort results in ascending order, use the --sort flag. Also, this flag overrides --sort.

Note that sorting results currently always forces ripgrep to abandon parallelism and run in a single thread.

This set of aggregate statistics may expand over time.

Note that this flag has no effect if --files, --files-with-matches or --files-without-match is passed.

This flag can be disabled with --no-stats.

When binary file detection is enabled it is imperfect. In general, it uses a simple heuristic. If a NUL byte is seen during search, then the file is considered binary and search stops (unless this flag is present).

Note that when the -u/--unrestricted flag is provided for a third time, then this flag is automatically enabled.

This flag can be disabled with --no-text.

This flag can be disabled with --no-trim.

Note that this MUST be passed to every invocation of ripgrep. Type settings are NOT persisted.

Example:

rg --type-add 'foo:*.foo' -tfoo PATTERN.

--type-add can also be used to include rules from other types with the special include directive. The include directive permits specifying one or more other type names (separated by a comma) that have been defined and its rules will automatically be imported into the type specified. For example, to create a type called src that matches C++, Python and Markdown files, one can use:

--type-add 'src:include:cpp,py,md'

Additional glob rules can still be added to the src type by using the --type-add flag again:

--type-add 'src:include:cpp,py,md' --type-add 'src:*.foo'

Note that type names must consist only of Unicode letters or numbers. Punctuation characters are not allowed.

Note that this MUST be passed to every invocation of ripgrep. Type settings are NOT persisted.

-uu is roughly equivalent to grep -r and -uuu is roughly equivalent to grep -a -r.

This flag overrides --no-filename.

This overrides the --line-regexp flag.

--smart-case

RIPGREP_CONFIG_PATH=wherever/.ripgreprc rg foo

rg --smart-case foo

--type-add
web:*.{html,css,js}*

rg --type-add 'web:*.{html,css,js}*' foo

--glob=!git/*

--glob
!git/*

rg --glob '!git/*' foo

RIPGREP_CONFIG_PATH=wherever/.ripgreprc rg foo --case-sensitive

rg --smart-case foo --case-sensitive