RipGrep | Searching fast using RipGrep

1. Introduction

Ripgrep a recursive search utility, to search in the directory you specified for your given pattern. This tool is specialized to code search having recursive search and automatic filtering in default. For example: I have to find out where the pdf-export() function is inside the web root directory then i will use this tool to search in that entire web root directory passing the pdf-export() as pattern. You obviously have the query why not grep and why ripgrep. The answer to this question is explained in upcoming sections in this page.

2. Installation

In ubuntu system, we can install ripgrep from apt repository.

sudo apt install ripgrep

In other linux distributions we can either find it on their package repository or we can simply add ripgrep in sources.

3. Basic Usage

Syntax:

The basic syntax of ripgrep is:

#Basic Syntax
rg [options] [pattern] [path]

Options:

• -l: List the file names matching the specified pattern
  • Example: Find out file names containing links.

    rg -l "https://" airline/

  • Here in the figure below we can see that the file names that contains https links.

  

• —files-without-match: List the file names that do not contain specified pattern.
  • Example: Find out file names that donot contain links.

    rg --files-without-match 'https://'

  • Here in the figure below we can see the file names that donot contain https links.
    

    

• -t: Specify file type
  • Example: Find out print statements inside scala.

    rg -t scala "println" airline/

  • Here in the figure below we can see the matches inside the scala source code in airline/ directory.
    

    

• -z: Search for compressed zip file.
  • Example:

Difference betwee RipGrep and Grep:

The primary difference between ripgrep and traditional GNU grep is that ripgrep is fast. The reason why it’s fast is that ripgrep leverages multiple cores for searching whereas grep doesn’t.

In the below shown figure we can see that when i search for pattern hi in the entire / directory the CPU used by two cores is parallel where no any over consumption of CPU occurs during the search.

The below shown figure is the CPU usage while doing the same task using grep. Here you can see that one core is in 100% use leaving another processor not in use.

RipGrep Examples

Recursive Search

When no file or directory is specified ripgrep will search recursively starting from the current directory. Here is the command to do recursive search.

rg [pattern] [directory]

rg "mytest()" scripts/

Filtering based on file types

To search for specific file type within a specified directory, we can use following command:

#find the specified pattern from python source file.
rg "Hello" --type py
#the recommended method to limit your search in python file is
rg -tpy [pattern]