RG(1) | RG(1) |
NAME¶
rg - recursively search the current directory for lines matching a pattern
SYNOPSIS¶
rg [OPTIONS] PATTERN [PATH...]
rg [OPTIONS] -e PATTERN... [PATH...]
rg [OPTIONS] -f PATTERNFILE... [PATH...]
rg [OPTIONS] --files [PATH...]
rg [OPTIONS] --type-list
command | rg [OPTIONS] PATTERN
rg [OPTIONS] --help
rg [OPTIONS] --version
DESCRIPTION¶
ripgrep (rg) recursively searches the current directory for a regex pattern. By default, ripgrep will respect your .gitignore and automatically skip hidden files/directories and binary files.
ripgrep’s default regex engine uses finite automata and guarantees linear time searching. Because of this, features like backreferences and arbitrary look-around are not supported. However, if ripgrep is built with PCRE2, then the --pcre2 flag can be used to enable backreferences and look-around.
ripgrep supports configuration files. Set RIPGREP_CONFIG_PATH to a configuration file. The file can specify one shell argument per line. Lines starting with # are ignored. For more details, see the man page or the README.
ripgrep will automatically detect if stdin exists and search stdin for a regex pattern, e.g. ls | rg foo. In some environments, stdin may exist when it shouldn’t. To turn off stdin detection explicitly specify the directory to search, e.g. rg foo ./.
Tip: to disable all smart filtering and make ripgrep behave a bit more like classical grep, use rg -uuu.
REGEX SYNTAX¶
ripgrep uses Rust’s regex engine by default, which documents its syntax: https://docs.rs/regex/*/regex/#syntax
ripgrep uses byte-oriented regexes, which has some additional documentation: https://docs.rs/regex/*/regex/bytes/index.html#syntax
To a first approximation, ripgrep uses Perl-like regexes without look-around or backreferences. This makes them very similar to the "extended" (ERE) regular expressions supported by egrep, but with a few additional features like Unicode character classes.
If you’re using ripgrep with the --pcre2 flag, then please consult https://www.pcre.org or the PCRE2 man pages for documentation on the supported syntax.
POSITIONAL ARGUMENTS¶
PATTERN
PATH
OPTIONS¶
Note that many options can be disabled via flags. In some cases, those flags are not listed in a first class way below. For example, the --column flag (listed below) enables column numbers in ripgrep’s output, but the --no-column flag (not listed below) disables them. The reverse can also exist. For example, the --no-ignore flag (listed below) disables ripgrep’s gitignore logic, but the --ignore flag (not listed below) enables it. These flags are useful for overriding a ripgrep configuration file on the command line. Each flag’s documentation notes whether an inverted flag exists. In all cases, the flag specified last takes precedence.
-A, --after-context NUM
This overrides the --context and --passthru flags.
--auto-hybrid-regex
When this flag is used, ripgrep will dynamically choose between supported regex engines depending on the features used in a pattern. When ripgrep chooses a regex engine, it applies that choice for every regex provided to ripgrep (e.g., via multiple -e/--regexp or -f/--file flags).
As an example of how this flag might behave, ripgrep will attempt to use its default finite automata based regex engine whenever the pattern can be successfully compiled with that regex engine. If PCRE2 is enabled and if the pattern given could not be compiled with the default regex engine, then PCRE2 will be automatically used for searching. If PCRE2 isn’t available, then this flag has no effect because there is only one regex engine to choose from.
In the future, ripgrep may adjust its heuristics for how it decides which regex engine to use. In general, the heuristics will be limited to a static analysis of the patterns, and not to any specific runtime behavior observed while searching files.
The primary downside of using this flag is that it may not always be obvious which regex engine ripgrep uses, and thus, the match semantics or performance profile of ripgrep may subtly and unexpectedly change. However, in many cases, all regex engines will agree on what constitutes a match and it can be nice to transparently support more advanced regex features like look-around and backreferences without explicitly needing to enable them.
This flag can be disabled with --no-auto-hybrid-regex.
-B, --before-context NUM
This overrides the --context and --passthru flags.
--binary
Binary files are heuristically detected based on whether they contain a NUL byte or not. By default (without this flag set), once a NUL byte is seen, ripgrep will stop searching the file. Usually, NUL bytes occur in the beginning of most binary files. If a NUL byte occurs after a match, then ripgrep will still stop searching the rest of the file, but a warning will be printed.
In contrast, when this flag is provided, ripgrep will continue searching a file even if a NUL byte is found. In particular, if a NUL byte is found then ripgrep will continue searching until either a match is found or the end of the file is reached, whichever comes sooner. If a match is found, then ripgrep will stop and print a warning saying that the search stopped prematurely.
If you want ripgrep to search a file without any special NUL byte handling at all (and potentially print binary data to stdout), then you should use the -a/--text flag.
The --binary flag is a flag for controlling ripgrep’s automatic filtering mechanism. As such, it does not need to be used when searching a file explicitly or when searching stdin. That is, it is only applicable when recursively searching a directory.
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-binary. It overrides the -a/--text flag.
--block-buffered
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.
-b, --byte-offset
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.
-s, --case-sensitive
This overrides the -i/--ignore-case and -S/--smart-case flags.
--color WHEN
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.
--colors COLOR_SPEC ...
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.
--column
This flag can be disabled with --no-column.
-C, --context NUM
This overrides both the -B/--before-context and -A/--after-context flags, in addition to the --passthru flag.
--context-separator SEPARATOR
When the context separator is set to an empty string, then a line break is still inserted. To completely disable context separators, use the --no-context-separator flag.
-c, --count
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. If you need a count to be printed regardless of whether there is a match, then use --include-zero.
This overrides the --count-matches flag. Note that when --count is combined with --only-matching, then ripgrep behaves as if --count-matches was given.
--count-matches
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.
--crlf
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.
--debug
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.
--dfa-size-limit NUM+SUFFIX?
The argument accepts the same size suffixes as allowed in with the --max-filesize flag.
-E, --encoding ENCODING
Other supported values can be found in the list of labels here: https://encoding.spec.whatwg.org/#concept-encoding-get
For more details on encoding and how ripgrep deals with it, see GUIDE.md.
This flag can be disabled with --no-encoding.
--engine ENGINE
Accepted values are default, pcre2, or auto.
The default value is default, which is the fastest and should be good for most use cases. The pcre2 engine is generally useful when you want to use features such as look-around or backreferences. auto will dynamically choose between supported regex engines depending on the features used in a pattern on a best effort basis.
Note that the pcre2 engine 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.
This overrides previous uses of --pcre2 and --auto-hybrid-regex flags.
--field-context-separator SEPARATOR
--field-match-separator SEPARATOR
-f, --file PATTERNFILE ...
A line is printed if and only if it matches at least one of the patterns.
--files
-l, --files-with-matches
This overrides --files-without-match.
--files-without-match
This overrides --files-with-matches.
-F, --fixed-strings
This flag can be disabled with --no-fixed-strings.
-L, --follow
This flag can be disabled with --no-follow.
-g, --glob GLOB ...
As an extension, globs support specifying alternatives: -g ab{c,d} is equivalet to -g abc -g abd. Empty alternatives like -g ab{,c} are not currently supported. Note that this syntax extension is also currently enabled in gitignore files, even though this syntax isn’t supported by git itself. ripgrep may disable this syntax extension in gitignore files, but it will always remain available via the -g/--glob flag.
When this flag is set, every file and directory is applied to it to test for a match. So for example, if you only want to search in a particular directory foo, then -g foo is incorrect because foo/bar does not match the glob foo. Instead, you should use -g 'foo/**'.
--glob-case-insensitive
This flag can be disabled with the --no-glob-case-insensitive flag.
--heading
This overrides the --no-heading flag.
-., --hidden
A file or directory is considered hidden if its base name starts with a dot character (.). On operating systems which support a hidden file attribute, like Windows, files with this attribute are also considered hidden.
This flag can be disabled with --no-hidden.
--iglob GLOB ...
-i, --ignore-case
This flag overrides -s/--case-sensitive and -S/--smart-case.
--ignore-file PATH ...
If you are looking for a way to include or exclude files and directories directly on the command line, then used -g instead.
--ignore-file-case-insensitive
This flag can be disabled with the --no-ignore-file-case-insensitive flag.
--include-zero
-v, --invert-match
--json
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.
--line-buffered
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.
-n, --line-number
-x, --line-regexp
This overrides the --word-regexp flag.
-M, --max-columns NUM
When this flag is omitted or is set to 0, then it has no effect.
--max-columns-preview
If the --max-columns flag is not set, then this has no effect.
This flag can be disabled with --no-max-columns-preview.
-m, --max-count NUM
--max-depth NUM
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.
--max-filesize NUM+SUFFIX?
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
--mmap
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.
-U, --multiline
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 enabled (the default), then the regex \p{any} will match any Unicode 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 mode is enabled, \p{any} will match any Unicode codepoint, including \n, 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.
--multiline-dotall
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.
--no-config
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.
-I, --no-filename
This flag overrides --with-filename.
--no-heading
This overrides the --heading flag.
--no-ignore
This does not imply --no-ignore-files, since --ignore-file is specified explicitly as a command line argument.
When given only once, the -u flag is identical in behavior to --no-ignore and can be considered an alias. However, subsequent -u flags have additional effects; see --unrestricted.
This flag can be disabled with the --ignore flag.
--no-ignore-dot
This does not affect whether ripgrep will ignore files and directories whose names begin with a dot. For that, see the -./--hidden flag.
This flag can be disabled with the --ignore-dot flag.
--no-ignore-exclude
This flag can be disabled with the --ignore-exclude flag.
--no-ignore-files
This flag can be disabled with the --ignore-files flag.
--no-ignore-global
This flag can be disabled with the --ignore-global flag.
--no-ignore-messages
This flag can be disabled with the --ignore-messages flag.
--no-ignore-parent
This flag can be disabled with the --ignore-parent flag.
--no-ignore-vcs
This flag can be disabled with the --ignore-vcs flag.
-N, --no-line-number
--no-messages
This flag can be disabled with the --messages flag.
--no-mmap
This flag overrides --mmap.
--no-pcre2-unicode
This flag is now an alias for --no-unicode. And --pcre2-unicode is an alias for --unicode.
--no-require-git
This flag can be disabled with --require-git.
--no-unicode
In some cases it can be desirable to turn these things off. The --no-unicode flag will do exactly that.
For PCRE2 specifically, Unicode mode 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. This penalty does not occur when using the default regex engine.
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.
The --no-unicode flag can be disabled with --unicode. Note that --no-pcre2-unicode and --pcre2-unicode are aliases for --no-unicode and --unicode, respectively.
-0, --null
--null-data
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.
--one-file-system
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.
-o, --only-matching
--passthru
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 overrides the --context, --after-context and --before-context flags.
--path-separator SEPARATOR
-P, --pcre2
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. PCRE2 may also have worse user experience in some cases, since it has fewer introspection APIs than ripgrep’s default regex engine. For example, if you use a \n in a PCRE2 regex without the -U/--multiline flag, then ripgrep will silently fail to match anything instead of reporting an error immediately (like it does with the default regex engine).
Related flags: --no-pcre2-unicode
This flag can be disabled with --no-pcre2.
--pcre2-version
--pre COMMAND
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. One possible mitigation to this is to use the '--pre-glob' flag to limit which files a preprocessor is run with.
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.
--pre-glob GLOB ...
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.
-p, --pretty
-q, --quiet
When --files is used, then ripgrep will stop finding files after finding the first file that matches all ignore rules.
--regex-size-limit NUM+SUFFIX?
The argument accepts the same size suffixes as allowed in the --max-filesize flag.
-e, --regexp PATTERN ...
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
-r, --replace REPLACEMENT_TEXT
Capture group indices (e.g., $5) and names (e.g., $foo) are supported in the replacement string. Capture group indices are numbered based on the position of the opening parenthesis of the group, where the leftmost such group is $1. The special $0 group corresponds to the entire match.
In shells such as Bash and zsh, you should wrap the pattern in single quotes instead of double quotes. Otherwise, capture group indices will be replaced by expanded shell variables which will most likely be empty.
To write a literal $, use $$.
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.
-z, --search-zip
This flag can be disabled with --no-search-zip.
-S, --smart-case
A pattern is considered all lowercase if both of the following rules hold:
First, the pattern contains at least one literal character. For example, a\w contains a literal (a) but just \w does not.
Second, of the literals in the pattern, none of them are considered to be uppercase according to Unicode. For example, foo\pL has no uppercase literals but Foo\pL does.
This overrides the -s/--case-sensitive and -i/--ignore-case flags.
--sort SORTBY
none (Default) Do not sort results. Fastest. Can be multi-threaded. path Sort by file path. Always single-threaded. modified Sort by the last modified time on a file. Always single-threaded. accessed Sort by the last accessed time on a file. Always single-threaded. created Sort by the creation time on a file. Always single-threaded.
If the chosen (manually or by-default) 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, print an error and exit without searching.
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.
--sortr SORTBY
none (Default) Do not sort results. Fastest. Can be multi-threaded. path Sort by file path. Always single-threaded. modified Sort by the last modified time on a file. Always single-threaded. accessed Sort by the last accessed time on a file. Always single-threaded. created Sort by the creation time on a file. Always single-threaded.
If the chosen (manually or by-default) 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, print an error and exit without searching.
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.
--stats
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.
-a, --text
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). Alternatively, if the --binary flag is used, then ripgrep will only quit when it sees a NUL byte after it sees a match (or searches the entire file).
This flag can be disabled with --no-text. It overrides the --binary flag.
-j, --threads NUM
--trim
This flag can be disabled with --no-trim.
-t, --type TYPE ...
This flag supports the special value all, which will behave as if --type was provided for every file type supported by ripgrep (including any custom file types). The end result is that --type all causes ripgrep to search in "whitelist" mode, where it will only search files it recognizes via its type definitions.
--type-add TYPE_SPEC ...
Note that this MUST be passed to every invocation of ripgrep. Type settings are NOT persisted. See CONFIGURATION FILES for a workaround.
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.
--type-clear TYPE ...
Note that this MUST be passed to every invocation of ripgrep. Type settings are NOT persisted. See CONFIGURATION FILES for a workaround.
--type-list
-T, --type-not TYPE ...
-u, --unrestricted ...
rg -uuu is roughly equivalent to grep -r.
--vimgrep
-H, --with-filename
This flag overrides --no-filename.
-w, --word-regexp
This overrides the --line-regexp flag.
EXIT STATUS¶
If ripgrep finds a match, then the exit status of the program is 0. If no match could be found, then the exit status is 1. If an error occurred, then the exit status is always 2 unless ripgrep was run with the --quiet flag and a match was found. In summary:
AUTOMATIC FILTERING¶
TL;DR - To disable automatic filtering, use rg -uuu.
One of ripgrep’s most important features is its automatic smart filtering. It is the most apparent differentiating feature between ripgrep and other tools like grep. As such, its behavior may be surprising to users that aren’t expecting it.
ripgrep does four types of filtering automatically:
The first type of filtering is the most sophisticated. ripgrep will attempt to respect your gitignore rules as faithfully as possible. In particular, this includes the following:
In some cases, ripgrep and git will not always be in sync in terms of which files are ignored. For example, a file that is ignored via .gitignore but is tracked by git would not be searched by ripgrep even though git tracks it. This is unlikely to ever be fixed. Instead, you should either make sure your exclude rules match the files you track precisely, or otherwise use git grep for search.
Additional ignore rules can be provided outside of a git context:
The precedence of ignore rules is as follows, with later items overriding earlier items:
So for example, if foo were in a .gitignore and !foo were in an .rgignore, then foo would not be ignored since .rgignore takes precedence over .gitignore.
Each of the types of filtering can be configured via command line flags:
As a special short hand, the -u flag can be specified up to three times. Each additional time incrementally decreases filtering:
In particular, rg -uuu should search the same exact content as grep -r.
CONFIGURATION FILES¶
ripgrep supports reading configuration files that change ripgrep’s default behavior. The format of the configuration file is an "rc" style and is very simple. It is defined by two rules:
ripgrep will look for a single configuration file if and only if the RIPGREP_CONFIG_PATH environment variable is set and is non-empty. ripgrep will parse shell arguments from this file on startup and will behave as if the arguments in this file were prepended to any explicit arguments given to ripgrep on the command line. Note though that the rg command you run must still be valid. That is, it must always contain at least one pattern at the command line, even if the configuration file uses the -e/--regexp flag.
For example, if your ripgreprc file contained a single line:
--smart-case
then the following command
RIPGREP_CONFIG_PATH=wherever/.ripgreprc rg foo
would behave identically to the following command
rg --smart-case foo
another example is adding types
--type-add web:*.{html,css,js}*
would behave identically to the following command
rg --type-add 'web:*.{html,css,js}*' foo
same with using globs
--glob=!.git
or
--glob !.git
would behave identically to the following command
rg --glob '!.git' foo
ripgrep also provides a flag, --no-config, that when present will suppress any and all support for configuration. This includes any future support for auto-loading configuration files from pre-determined paths.
Conflicts between configuration files and explicit arguments are handled exactly like conflicts in the same command line invocation. That is, this command:
RIPGREP_CONFIG_PATH=wherever/.ripgreprc rg foo --case-sensitive
is exactly equivalent to
rg --smart-case foo --case-sensitive
in which case, the --case-sensitive flag would override the --smart-case flag.
SHELL COMPLETION¶
Shell completion files are included in the release tarball for Bash, Fish, Zsh and PowerShell.
For bash, move rg.bash to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/bash_completion or /etc/bash_completion.d/.
For fish, move rg.fish to $HOME/.config/fish/completions.
For zsh, move _rg to one of your $fpath directories.
CAVEATS¶
ripgrep may abort unexpectedly when using default settings if it searches a file that is simultaneously truncated. This behavior can be avoided by passing the --no-mmap flag which will forcefully disable the use of memory maps in all cases.
ripgrep may use a large amount of memory depending on a few factors. Firstly, if ripgrep uses parallelism for search (the default), then the entire output for each individual file is buffered into memory in order to prevent interleaving matches in the output. To avoid this, you can disable parallelism with the -j1 flag. Secondly, ripgrep always needs to have at least a single line in memory in order to execute a search. A file with a very long line can thus cause ripgrep to use a lot of memory. Generally, this only occurs when searching binary data with the -a flag enabled. (When the -a flag isn’t enabled, ripgrep will replace all NUL bytes with line terminators, which typically prevents exorbitant memory usage.) Thirdly, when ripgrep searches a large file using a memory map, the process will report its resident memory usage as the size of the file. However, this does not mean ripgrep actually needed to use that much memory; the operating system will generally handle this for you.
VERSION¶
13.0.0
HOMEPAGE¶
https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
Please report bugs and feature requests in the issue tracker. Please do your best to provide a reproducible test case for bugs. This should include the corpus being searched, the rg command, the actual output and the expected output. Please also include the output of running the same rg command but with the --debug flag.
AUTHORS¶
Andrew Gallant <jamslam@gmail.com>
08/05/2023 |