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 -P/--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 CONFIGURATION FILES below.

ripgrep will automatically detect if stdin is a readable file 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, one can explicitly specify the directory to search, e.g. rg foo ./.

Like other tools such as ls, ripgrep will alter its output depending on whether stdout is connected to a tty. By default, when printing a tty, ripgrep will enable colors, line numbers and a heading format that lists each matching file path once instead of once per matching line.

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/1.*/regex/#syntax

ripgrep uses byte-oriented regexes, which has some additional documentation: https://docs.rs/regex/1.*/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 -P/--pcre2 flag, then please consult https://www.pcre.org or the PCRE2 man pages for documentation on the supported syntax.

POSITIONAL ARGUMENTS

PATTERN
    A regular expression used for searching. To match a pattern beginning with a dash, use the -e/--regexp option.

PATH
    A file or directory to search. Directories are searched recursively. File paths specified explicitly on the command line override glob and ignore rules.

OPTIONS
This section documents all flags that ripgrep accepts. Flags are grouped into categories below according to their function.

Note that many options can be turned on and off. In some cases, those flags are not listed explicitly 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 (or alias) on the command line. Each flag's documentation notes whether an inverted flag exists. In all cases, the flag specified last takes precedence.

  INPUT OPTIONS
!!input!!

  SEARCH OPTIONS
!!search!!

  FILTER OPTIONS
!!filter!!

  OUTPUT OPTIONS
!!output!!

  OUTPUT MODES
!!output-modes!!

  LOGGING OPTIONS
!!logging!!

  OTHER BEHAVIORS
!!other-behaviors!!

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 -q/--quiet flag and a match was found. In summary:

•   0 exit status occurs only when at least one match was found, and if no error occurred, unless -q/--quiet was given.

•   1 exit status occurs only when no match was found and no error occurred.

•   2 exit status occurs when an error occurred. This is true for both catastrophic errors (e.g., a regex syntax error) and for soft errors (e.g., unable to read a file).

AUTOMATIC FILTERING
ripgrep does a fair bit of automatic filtering by default. This section describes that filtering and how to control it.

TIP: To disable automatic filtering, use rg -uuu.

ripgrep's automatic "smart" filtering is one of the most apparent differentiating features 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:

1.  Files and directories that match ignore rules are not searched.

2.  Hidden files and directories are not searched.

3.  Binary files (files with a NUL byte) are not searched.

4.  Symbolic links are not followed.

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:

•   Any global rules, e.g., in $HOME/.config/git/ignore.

•   Any rules in relevant .gitignore files. This includes .gitignore files in parent directories that are part of the same git repository. (Unless --no-require-git is given.)

•   Any local rules, e.g., in .git/info/exclude.

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:

•   Any rules in .ignore. ripgrep will also respect .ignore files in parent directories.

•   Any rules in .rgignore. ripgrep will also respect .rgignore files in parent directories.

•   Any rules in files specified with the --ignore-file flag.

The precedence of ignore rules is as follows, with later items overriding earlier items:

•   Files given by --ignore-file.

•   Global gitignore rules, e.g., from $HOME/.config/git/ignore.

•   Local rules from .git/info/exclude.

•   Rules from .gitignore.

•   Rules from .ignore.

•   Rules from .rgignore.

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:

•   There are several flags starting with --no-ignore that toggle which, if any, ignore rules are respected. --no-ignore by itself will disable all of them.

•   -./--hidden will force ripgrep to search hidden files and directories.

•   --binary will force ripgrep to search binary files.

•   -L/--follow will force ripgrep to follow symlinks.

As a special short hand, the -u flag can be specified up to three times. Each additional time incrementally decreases filtering:

•   -u is equivalent to --no-ignore.

•   -uu is equivalent to --no-ignore --hidden.

•   -uuu is equivalent to --no-ignore --hidden --binary.

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:

1.  Every line is a shell argument, after trimming whitespace.

2.  Lines starting with # (optionally preceded by any amount of whitespace) are ignored.

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 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, like so:

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

The above would behave identically to the following command:

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

The same applies to using globs. This:

        --glob=!.git

or this:

        --glob
        !.git

would behave identically to the following command:

        rg --glob '!.git' foo

The bottom line is that every shell argument needs to be on its own line. So for example, a config file containing

        -j 4

is probably not doing what you intend. Instead, you want

        -j
        4

or

        -j4

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, assuming your config file contains only --smart-case, then 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/--text flag enabled. (When the -a/--text 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 likely report its resident memory usage as the size of the file. However, this does not mean ripgrep actually needed to use that much heap memory; the operating system will generally handle this for you.

VERSION
!!VERSION!!

HOMEPAGE
https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep

Please report bugs and feature requests to 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.

If you have questions that don't obviously fall into the "bug" or "feature request" category, then they are welcome in the Discussions section of the issue tracker: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/discussions.

AUTHORS
Andrew Gallant <jamslam@gmail.com>