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:

ripgrep uses byte-oriented regexes, which has some additional documentation:

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 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

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
    Show NUM lines after each match.

    This overrides the --context and --passthru flags.

--auto-hybrid-regex
    DEPRECATED. Use --engine instead.

    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
    Show NUM lines before each match.

    This overrides the --context and --passthru flags.

--binary
    Enabling this flag will cause ripgrep to search binary files. By default, ripgrep attempts to automatically skip binary files in order to improve the relevance of results and make the search faster.

    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
    When enabled, ripgrep will use block buffering. That is, whenever a matching line is found, it will be written to an in-memory buffer and will not be written to stdout until the buffer reaches a certain size. This is the default when ripgrep’s stdout is redirected to a pipeline or a file. When ripgrep’s stdout is connected to a terminal, line buffering will be used. Forcing block buffering can be useful when dumping a large amount of contents to a terminal.

    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
    Print the 0-based byte offset within the input file before each line of output. If -o (--only-matching) is specified, print the offset of the matching part itself.

    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
    Search case sensitively.

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

--color WHEN
    This flag controls when to use colors. The default setting is auto, which means ripgrep will try to guess when to use colors. For example, if ripgrep is printing to a terminal, then it will use colors, but if it is redirected to a file or a pipe, then it will suppress color output. ripgrep will suppress color output in some other circumstances as well. For example, if the TERM environment variable is not set or set to dumb, then ripgrep will not use colors.

    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 ...
    This flag specifies color settings for use in the output. This flag may be provided multiple times. Settings are applied iteratively. Colors are limited to one of eight choices: red, blue, green, cyan, magenta, yellow, white and black. Styles are limited to nobold, bold, nointense, intense, nounderline or underline.

    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
    Show column numbers (1-based). This only shows the column numbers for the first match on each line. This does not try to account for Unicode. One byte is equal to one column. This implies --line-number.

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

-C, --context NUM
    Show NUM lines before and after each match. This is equivalent to providing both the -B/--before-context and -A/--after-context flags with the same value.

    This overrides both the -B/--before-context and -A/--after-context flags, in addition to the --passthru flag.

--context-separator SEPARATOR
    The string used to separate non-contiguous context lines in the output. This is only used when one of the context flags is used (-A, -B or -C). Escape sequences like \x7F or \t may be used. The default value is --.

    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
    This flag suppresses normal output and shows the number of lines that match the given patterns for each file searched. Each file containing a match has its path and count printed on each line. Note that this reports the number of lines that match and not the total number of matches, unless -U/--multiline is enabled. In multiline mode, --count is equivalent to --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. 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
    This flag suppresses normal output and shows the number of individual matches of the given patterns for each file searched. Each file containing matches has its path and match count printed on each line. Note that this reports the total number of individual matches and not the number of lines that match.

    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
    When enabled, ripgrep will treat CRLF (\r\n) as a line terminator instead of just \n.

    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
    Show debug messages. Please use this when filing a bug report.

    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 upper size limit of the regex DFA. The default limit is 10M. This should only be changed on very large regex inputs where the (slower) fallback regex engine may otherwise be used if the limit is reached.

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

-E, --encoding ENCODING
    Specify the text encoding that ripgrep will use on all files searched. The default value is auto, which will cause ripgrep to do a best effort automatic detection of encoding on a per-file basis. Automatic detection in this case only applies to files that begin with a UTF-8 or UTF-16 byte-order mark (BOM). No other automatic detection is performed. One can also specify none which will then completely disable BOM sniffing and always result in searching the raw bytes, including a BOM if it’s present, regardless of its encoding.

    Other supported values can be found in the list of labels here:

    For more details on encoding and how ripgrep deals with it, see GUIDE.md.

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

--engine ENGINE
    Specify which regular expression engine to use. When you choose a regex engine, it applies that choice for every regex provided to ripgrep (e.g., via multiple -e/--regexp or -f/--file flags).

    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
    Set the field context separator, which is used to delimit file paths, line numbers, columns and the context itself, when printing contextual lines. The separator may be any number of bytes, including zero. Escape sequences like \x7F or \t may be used. The default value is -.

--field-match-separator SEPARATOR
    Set the field match separator, which is used to delimit file paths, line numbers, columns and the match itself. The separator may be any number of bytes, including zero. Escape sequences like \x7F or \t may be used. The default value is -.

-f, --file PATTERNFILE ...
    Search for patterns from the given file, with one pattern per line. When this flag is used multiple times or in combination with the -e/--regexp flag, then all patterns provided are searched. Empty pattern lines will match all input lines, and the newline is not counted as part of the pattern.

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

--files
    Print each file that would be searched without actually performing the search. This is useful to determine whether a particular file is being searched or not.

-l, --files-with-matches
    Print the paths with at least one match and suppress match contents.

    This overrides --files-without-match.

--files-without-match
    Print the paths that contain zero matches and suppress match contents. This inverts/negates the --files-with-matches flag.

    This overrides --files-with-matches.

-F, --fixed-strings
    Treat the pattern as a literal string instead of a regular expression. When this flag is used, special regular expression meta characters such as .(){}*+ do not need to be escaped.

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

-L, --follow
    When this flag is enabled, ripgrep will follow symbolic links while traversing directories. This is disabled by default. Note that ripgrep will check for symbolic link loops and report errors if it finds one.

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

-g, --glob GLOB ...
    Include or exclude files and directories for searching that match the given glob. This always overrides any other ignore logic. Multiple glob flags may be used. Globbing rules match .gitignore globs. Precede a glob with a ! to exclude it. If multiple globs match a file or directory, the glob given later in the command line takes precedence.

    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
    Process glob patterns given with the -g/--glob flag case insensitively. This effectively treats --glob as --iglob.

    This flag can be disabled with the --no-glob-case-insensitive flag.

--heading
    This flag prints the file path above clusters of matches from each file instead of printing the file path as a prefix for each matched line. This is the default mode when printing to a terminal.

    This overrides the --no-heading flag.

-., --hidden
    Search hidden files and directories. By default, hidden files and directories are skipped. Note that if a hidden file or a directory is whitelisted in an ignore file, then it will be searched even if this flag isn’t provided.

    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 ...
    Include or exclude files and directories for searching that match the given glob. This always overrides any other ignore logic. Multiple glob flags may be used. Globbing rules match .gitignore globs. Precede a glob with a ! to exclude it. Globs are matched case insensitively.

-i, --ignore-case
    When this flag is provided, the given patterns will be searched case insensitively. The case insensitivity rules used by ripgrep conform to Unicode’s "simple" case folding rules.

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

--ignore-file PATH ...
    Specifies a path to one or more .gitignore format rules files. These patterns are applied after the patterns found in .gitignore and .ignore are applied and are matched relative to the current working directory. Multiple additional ignore files can be specified by using the --ignore-file flag several times. When specifying multiple ignore files, earlier files have lower precedence than later files.

    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
    Process ignore files (.gitignore, .ignore, etc.) case insensitively. Note that this comes with a performance penalty and is most useful on case insensitive file systems (such as Windows).

    This flag can be disabled with the --no-ignore-file-case-insensitive flag.

--include-zero
    When used with --count or --count-matches, print the number of matches for each file even if there were zero matches. This is disabled by default but can be enabled to make ripgrep behave more like grep.

-v, --invert-match
    Invert matching. Show lines that do not match the given patterns.

--json
    Enable printing results in a JSON Lines format.

    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:

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

--line-buffered
    When enabled, ripgrep will use line buffering. That is, whenever a matching line is found, it will be flushed to stdout immediately. This is the default when ripgrep’s stdout is connected to a terminal, but otherwise, ripgrep will use block buffering, which is typically faster. This flag forces ripgrep to use line buffering even if it would otherwise use block buffering. This is typically useful in shell pipelines, e.g., tail -f something.log | rg foo --line-buffered | rg bar.

    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
    Show line numbers (1-based). This is enabled by default when searching in a terminal.

-x, --line-regexp
    Only show matches surrounded by line boundaries. This is equivalent to putting ^...$ around all of the search patterns. In other words, this only prints lines where the entire line participates in a match.

    This overrides the --word-regexp flag.

-M, --max-columns NUM
    Don’t print lines longer than this limit in bytes. Longer lines are omitted, and only the number of matches in that line is printed.

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

--max-columns-preview
    When the --max-columns flag is used, ripgrep will by default completely replace any line that is too long with a message indicating that a matching line was removed. When this flag is combined with --max-columns, a preview of the line (corresponding to the limit size) is shown instead, where the part of the line exceeding the limit is not shown.

    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
    Limit the number of matching lines per file searched to NUM.

--max-depth NUM
    Limit the depth of directory traversal to NUM levels beyond the paths given. A value of zero only searches the explicitly given paths themselves.

    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?
    Ignore files larger than NUM in size. This does not apply to directories.

    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
    Search using memory maps when possible. This is enabled by default when ripgrep thinks it will be faster.

    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
    Enable matching across multiple lines.

    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
    This flag enables "dot all" in your regex pattern, which causes . to match newlines when multiline searching is enabled. This flag has no effect if multiline searching isn’t enabled with the --multiline flag.

    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
    Never read configuration files. When this flag is present, ripgrep will not respect the RIPGREP_CONFIG_PATH environment variable.

    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
    Never print the file path with the matched lines. This is the default when ripgrep is explicitly instructed to search one file or stdin.

    This flag overrides --with-filename.

--no-heading
    Don’t group matches by each file. If --no-heading is provided in addition to the -H/--with-filename flag, then file paths will be printed as a prefix for every matched line. This is the default mode when not printing to a terminal.

    This overrides the --heading flag.

--no-ignore
    Don’t respect ignore files (.gitignore, .ignore, etc.). This implies --no-ignore-dot, --no-ignore-exclude, --no-ignore-global, no-ignore-parent and --no-ignore-vcs.

    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
    Don’t respect .ignore files.

    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
    Don’t respect ignore files that are manually configured for the repository such as git’s .git/info/exclude.

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

--no-ignore-files
    When set, any --ignore-file flags, even ones that come after this flag, are ignored.

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

--no-ignore-global
    Don’t respect ignore files that come from "global" sources such as git’s core.excludesFile configuration option (which defaults to $HOME/.config/git/ignore).

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

--no-ignore-messages
    Suppresses all error messages related to parsing ignore files such as .ignore or .gitignore.

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

--no-ignore-parent
    Don’t respect ignore files (.gitignore, .ignore, etc.) in parent directories.

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

--no-ignore-vcs
    Don’t respect version control ignore files (.gitignore, etc.). This implies --no-ignore-parent for VCS files. Note that .ignore files will continue to be respected.

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

-N, --no-line-number
    Suppress line numbers. This is enabled by default when not searching in a terminal.

--no-messages
    Suppress all error messages related to opening and reading files. Error messages related to the syntax of the pattern given are still shown.

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

--no-mmap
    Never use memory maps, even when they might be faster.

    This flag overrides --mmap.

--no-pcre2-unicode
    DEPRECATED. Use --no-unicode instead.

    This flag is now an alias for --no-unicode. And --pcre2-unicode is an alias for --unicode.

--no-require-git
    By default, ripgrep will only respect global gitignore rules, .gitignore rules and local exclude rules if ripgrep detects that you are searching inside a git repository. This flag allows you to relax this restriction such that ripgrep will respect all git related ignore rules regardless of whether you’re searching in a git repository or not.

    This flag can be disabled with --require-git.

--no-unicode
    By default, ripgrep will enable "Unicode mode" in all of its regexes. This has a number of consequences:

        • . will only match valid UTF-8 encoded scalar values.

        • Classes like \w, \s, \d are all Unicode aware and much bigger than their ASCII only versions.

        • Case insensitive matching will use Unicode case folding.

        • A large array of classes like \p{Emoji} are available.

        • Word boundaries (\b and \B) use the Unicode definition of a word character.

        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
    Whenever a file path is printed, follow it with a NUL byte. This includes printing file paths before matches, and when printing a list of matching files such as with --count, --files-with-matches and --files. This option is useful for use with xargs.

--null-data
    Enabling this option causes ripgrep to use NUL as a line terminator instead of the default of \n.

    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
    When enabled, ripgrep will not cross file system boundaries relative to where the search started from.

    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
    Print only the matched (non-empty) parts of a matching line, with each such part on a separate output line.

--passthru
    Print both matching and non-matching lines.

    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
    Set the path separator to use when printing file paths. This defaults to your platform’s path separator, which is / on Unix and \ on Windows. This flag is intended for overriding the default when the environment demands it (e.g., cygwin). A path separator is limited to a single byte.

-P, --pcre2
    When this flag is present, ripgrep will use the PCRE2 regex engine instead of its default regex engine.

    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
    When this flag is present, ripgrep will print the version of PCRE2 in use, along with other information, and then exit. If PCRE2 is not available, then ripgrep will print an error message and exit with an error code.

--pre COMMAND
    For each input FILE, search the standard output of COMMAND FILE rather than the contents of FILE. This option expects the COMMAND program to either be an absolute path or to be available in your PATH. Either an empty string COMMAND or the --no-pre flag will disable this behavior.

        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 works in conjunction with the --pre flag. Namely, when one or more --pre-glob flags are given, then only files that match the given set of globs will be handed to the command specified by the --pre flag. Any non-matching files will be searched without using the preprocessor command.

    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
    This is a convenience alias for --color always --heading --line-number. This flag is useful when you still want pretty output even if you’re piping ripgrep to another program or file. For example: rg -p foo | less -R.

-q, --quiet
    Do not print anything to stdout. If a match is found in a file, then ripgrep will stop searching. This is useful when ripgrep is used only for its exit code (which will be an error if no matches are found).

    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 upper size limit of the compiled regex. The default limit is 10M.

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

-e, --regexp PATTERN ...
    A pattern to search for. This option can be provided multiple times, where all patterns given are searched. Lines matching at least one of the provided patterns are printed. This flag can also be used when searching for patterns that start with a dash.

    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
    Replace every match with the text given when printing results. Neither this flag nor any other ripgrep flag will modify your files.

    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
    Search in compressed files. Currently gzip, bzip2, xz, LZ4, LZMA, Brotli and Zstd files are supported. This option expects the decompression binaries to be available in your PATH.

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

-S, --smart-case
    Searches case insensitively if the pattern is all lowercase. Search case sensitively otherwise.

    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
    This flag enables sorting of results in ascending order. The possible values for this flag are:

        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
    This flag enables sorting of results in descending order. The possible values for this flag are:

        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
    Print aggregate statistics about this ripgrep search. When this flag is present, ripgrep will print the following stats to stdout at the end of the search: number of matched lines, number of files with matches, number of files searched, and the time taken for the entire search to complete.

    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
    Search binary files as if they were text. When this flag is present, ripgrep’s binary file detection is disabled. This means that when a binary file is searched, its contents may be printed if there is a match. This may cause escape codes to be printed that alter the behavior of your terminal.

    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
    The approximate number of threads to use. A value of 0 (which is the default) causes ripgrep to choose the thread count using heuristics.

--trim
    When set, all ASCII whitespace at the beginning of each line printed will be trimmed.

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

-t, --type TYPE ...
    Only search files matching TYPE. Multiple type flags may be provided. Use the --type-list flag to list all available types.

    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 ...
    Add a new glob for a particular file type. Only one glob can be added at a time. Multiple --type-add flags can be provided. Unless --type-clear is used, globs are added to any existing globs defined inside of ripgrep.

    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 ...
    Clear the file type globs previously defined for TYPE. This only clears the default type definitions that are found inside of ripgrep.

    Note that this MUST be passed to every invocation of ripgrep. Type settings are NOT persisted. See CONFIGURATION FILES for a workaround.

--type-list
    Show all supported file types and their corresponding globs.

-T, --type-not TYPE ...
    Do not search files matching TYPE. Multiple type-not flags may be provided. Use the --type-list flag to list all available types.

-u, --unrestricted ...
    Reduce the level of "smart" searching. A single -u won’t respect .gitignore (etc.) files (--no-ignore). Two -u flags will additionally search hidden files and directories (-./--hidden). Three -u flags will additionally search binary files (--binary).

    rg -uuu is roughly equivalent to grep -r.

--vimgrep
    Show results with every match on its own line, including line numbers and column numbers. With this option, a line with more than one match will be printed more than once.

-H, --with-filename
    Display the file path for matches. This is the default when more than one file is searched. If --heading is enabled (the default when printing to a terminal), the file path will be shown above clusters of matches from each file; otherwise, the file name will be shown as a prefix for each matched line.

    This flag overrides --no-filename.

-w, --word-regexp
    Only show matches surrounded by word boundaries. This is roughly equivalent to putting \b before and after all of the search patterns.

    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:

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

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:

    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 .gitignore.

    • 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.

    • Any rules in .rgignore.

    • 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 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

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