

Read all files under each directory, recursively this is Here’s the section of the Linux grep man page that discusses the -r flag:
#Grep wildcard how to
Since I tend to mark comments in my code with my initials ("aja") or my name ("alvin"), this recursive egrep command shows how to search for those two patterns, again in a case-insensitive manner: You can also perform recursive searches with the egrep command, which lets you search for multiple patterns at one time. In this example, the search is made case-insensitive by adding the -i argument to the grep command. This next example shows how to recursively search two unrelated directories for the case-insensitive string "alvin": Your recursive grep searches don’t have to be limited to just the current directory. If you haven’t used commands like these before, to demonstrate the results of this search, in a PHP project directory I’m working in right now, this command returns a list of files like this: As you’ll see below, you can also add -i for case-insensitive searches.The -l option (lowercase letter L) says “list only filenames”.The -r option says “do a recursive search”.However, I was just reminded that a much easier way to perform the same recursive search is with the -r flag of the grep command:Īs you can see, this is a much shorter command, and it performs the same recursive search as the longer command, specifically: This command can be read as, “Search all files in all subdirectories of the current directory for the string ‘alvin’, and print the filenames that contain this pattern.” It’s an extremely powerful approach for recursively searching files in all subdirectories that match the pattern I specify. Solution 1: Combine 'find' and 'grep'įor years I always used variations of the following Linux find and grep commands to recursively search subdirectories for files that match a grep pattern:įind. Two solutions are shown next, followed by some additional details which may be useful. We can tell ripgrep that we want it to interpret the search string as a fixed string rather than a regular expression pattern.Unix/Linux grep FAQ: How can I perform a recursive search with the grep command in Linux?

It must follow an expression, which it doesn't do here. In a regular expression, the ? character denotes a repetition operator that makes the previous expression optional. In the above example, our search for the pattern ?. ^ error: repetition operator missing expression However, if we want to search for a string that is not a well-formed regular expression, we get an error: $ rg '?.' regex parse error: ?. We've seen in the previous section how we can search for several strings using the pattern var|let|const using an alternation, and there was no need for an additional flag to tell ripgrep to interpret the pattern as a regular expression rather than a fixed string. Usually, it's useful that ripgrep treats every search pattern as a regular expression by default. Check out ripgrep is faster than ', I'm excluding all lines that start with three pluses or minuses, giving me a cleaner output at the end. I've thrown hundreds of thousands of files at it and didn't encounter any performance issues. It also ignores binary files, skips hidden files and directories, and doesn't follow symbolic links. gitignore files and skips matching files and directories by default. I like that! For example, ripgrep respects. It picks sensible defaults out of the box. For me, it boils down to the following reasons: So what makes ripgrep so great? After all, there are plenty of other search tools out there already, like grep, ack, or The Silver Searcher. ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern and outputs all matches that it finds. In this post, I want to introduce you to ripgrep, a smart and fast command line search tool that I find myself using all the time when programming. Fast Searching with ripgrep March 19, 2020
