rg - Man Page

A pattern to search for. This option can be provided multiple times, where all patterns given are searched, in addition to any patterns provided by -f/--file. 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:

    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

When -f/--file or -e/--regexp is used, then ripgrep treats all positional arguments as files or directories to search.

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.

When PATTERNFILE is -, then stdin will be read for the patterns.

When -f/--file or -e/--regexp is used, then ripgrep treats all positional arguments as files or directories to search.

For each input PATH, this flag causes ripgrep to search the standard output of COMMAND PATH instead of the contents of PATH. This option expects the COMMAND program to either be a 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 preprocessors, COMMAND should be a wrapper program which first classifies PATH based on magic numbers/content or based on the PATH name and then dispatches to an appropriate preprocessor. Each COMMAND also has its standard input connected to PATH 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.

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 provides 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 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.

This flag instructs ripgrep to search in compressed files. Currently gzip, bzip2, xz, LZ4, LZMA, Brotli and Zstd files are supported. This option expects the decompression binaries (such as gzip) to be available in your PATH. If the required binaries are not found, then ripgrep will not emit an error messages by default. Use the --debug flag to see more information.

Note that this flag does not make ripgrep search archive formats as directory trees. It only makes ripgrep detect compressed files and then decompress them before searching their contents as it would any other file.

This overrides the --pre flag.

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

Execute the search case sensitively. This is the default mode.

This is a global option that applies to all patterns given to ripgrep. Individual patterns can still be matched case insensitively by using inline regex flags. For example, (?i)abc will match abc case insensitively even when this flag is used.

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

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

Principally, this permits the line anchor assertions ^ and $ in regex patterns to treat CRLF, CR or LF as line terminators instead of just LF. Note that they will never match between a CR and a LF. CRLF is treated as one single line terminator.

When using the default regex engine, CRLF support can also be enabled inside the pattern with the R flag. For example, (?R:$) will match just before either CR or LF, but never between CR and LF.

This flag overrides --null-data.

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

The upper size limit of the regex DFA. The default limit is something generous for any single pattern or for many smallish patterns. 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 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.

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: https://encoding.spec.whatwg.org/#concept-encoding-get.

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

The encoding detection that ripgrep uses can be reverted to its automatic mode via the --no-encoding flag.

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 usually 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 the -P/--pcre2 and --auto-hybrid-regex flags.

Treat all patterns as literals instead of as regular expressions. When this flag is used, special regular expression meta characters such as .(){}*+ should not need be escaped.

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

When this flag is provided, all patterns will be searched case insensitively. The case insensitivity rules used by ripgrep's default regex engine conform to Unicode's "simple" case folding rules.

This is a global option that applies to all patterns given to ripgrep. Individual patterns can still be matched case sensitively by using inline regex flags. For example, (?-i)abc will match abc case sensitively even when this flag is used.

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

This flag inverts matching. That is, instead of printing lines that match, ripgrep will print lines that don't match.

Note that this only inverts line-by-line matching. For example, combining this flag with -l/--files-with-matches will emit files that contain any lines that do not match the patterns given. That's not the same as, for example, --files-without-match, which will emit files that do not contain any matching lines.

This flag can be disabled with --no-invert-match.

When enabled, ripgrep will only show matches surrounded by line boundaries. This is equivalent to surrounding every pattern with ^ and $. In other words, this only prints lines where the entire line participates in a match.

This overrides the -w/--word-regexp flag.

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

Note that 0 is a legal value but not likely to be useful. When used, ripgrep won't search anything.

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

Memory map searching cannot be used in all circumstances. For example, when searching virtual files or streams likes stdin. In such cases, memory maps will not be used even when this flag is enabled.

Note that ripgrep may abort unexpectedly when memory maps are used if it searches a file that is simultaneously truncated. Users can opt out of this possibility by disabling memory maps.

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

This flag enable searching 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 -U/--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 overrides the --stop-on-nonmatch flag.

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

This flag enables "dot all" mode in all regex patterns. This causes . to match line terminators when multiline searching is enabled. This flag has no effect if multiline searching isn't enabled with the -U/--multiline flag.

Normally, a . will match any character except line terminators. 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, multiline mode runs without "dot all" mode enabled.

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". Moreover, you can use character classes like \p{any} to match any Unicode codepoint regardless of whether "dot all" mode is enabled or not.

This flag can be disabled with --no-multiline-dotall.

This flag disables Unicode mode for all patterns given to ripgrep.

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 Unicode 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. (Although the specific set of classes available varies based on the regex engine. In general, the default regex engine has more classes available to it.)
• 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. This flag will do exactly that. For example, Unicode mode can sometimes have a negative impact on performance, especially when things like \w are used frequently (including via bounded repetitions like \w{100}) when only their ASCII interpretation is needed.

This flag can be disabled with --unicode.

Enabling this flag 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. It also overrides --crlf.

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.

Using this flag is the same as passing --engine=pcre2. Users may instead elect to use --engine=auto to ask ripgrep to automatically select the right regex engine based on the patterns given. This flag and the --engine flag override one another.

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).

This flag can be disabled with --no-pcre2.

The size limit of the compiled regex, where the compiled regex generally corresponds to a single object in memory that can match all of the patterns provided to ripgrep. The default limit is generous enough that most reasonable patterns (or even a small number of them) should fit.

This useful to change when you explicitly want to let ripgrep spend potentially much more time and/or memory building a regex matcher.

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.

This flag instructs ripgrep to searches case insensitively if the pattern is all lowercase. Otherwise, ripgrep will search case sensitively.

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.

Enabling this option will cause ripgrep to stop reading a file once it encounters a non-matching line after it has encountered a matching line. This is useful if it is expected that all matches in a given file will be on sequential lines, for example due to the lines being sorted.

This overrides the -U/--multiline flag.

This flag instructs ripgrep to 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 searching 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 overrides the --binary flag.

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

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

When enabled, ripgrep will only show matches surrounded by word boundaries. This is equivalent to surrounding every pattern with \b{start-half} and \b{end-half}.

This overrides the -x/--line-regexp flag.

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.

DEPRECATED. Use --no-unicode instead.

Note that Unicode mode is enabled by default.

This flag can be disabled with --pcre2-unicode.

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 not print the match, stop searching that file, and emit a warning that some matches are being suppressed.

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.

When the -u/--unrestricted flag is provided for a third time, then this flag is automatically enabled.

This flag overrides the -a/--text flag.

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

This flag instructs ripgrep to follow symbolic links while traversing directories. This behavior is disabled by default. Note that ripgrep will check for symbolic link loops and report errors if it finds one. ripgrep will also report errors for broken links. To suppress error messages, use the --no-messages flag.

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

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 equivalent 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. 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/**'.

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

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

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. Similarly if a hidden file or directory is given explicitly as an argument to ripgrep.

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.

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. Globs used via this flag are matched case insensitively.

Specifies a path to one or more gitignore formatted rules files. These patterns are applied after the patterns found in .gitignore, .rgignore and .ignore are applied and are matched relative to the current working directory. Multiple additional ignore files can be specified by using this flag repeatedly. 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 use -g/--glob instead.

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 --no-ignore-file-case-insensitive.

This flag limits the depth of directory traversal to NUM levels beyond the paths given. A value of 0 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.

An alternative spelling for this flag is --maxdepth.

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.

When set, ignore files such as .gitignore, .ignore and .rgignore will not be respected. 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/--unrestricted flag is identical in behavior to this flag and can be considered an alias. However, subsequent -u/--unrestricted flags have additional effects.

This flag can be disabled with --ignore.

Don't respect filter rules from .ignore or .rgignore files.

This does not impact whether ripgrep will ignore files and directories whose names begin with a dot. For that, see the -./--hidden flag. This flag also does not impact whether filter rules from .gitignore files are respected.

This flag can be disabled with --ignore-dot.

Don't respect filter rules from files that are manually configured for the repository. For example, this includes git's .git/info/exclude.

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

When set, any --ignore-file flags, even ones that come after this flag, are ignored.

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

Don't respect filter rules from 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 --ignore-global.

When this flag is set, filter rules from ignore files found in parent directories are not respected. By default, ripgrep will ascend the parent directories of the current working directory to look for any applicable ignore files that should be applied. In some cases this may not be desirable.

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

When given, filter rules from source control ignore files (e.g., .gitignore) are not respected. By default, ripgrep respects git's ignore rules for automatic filtering. In some cases, it may not be desirable to respect the source control's ignore rules and instead only respect rules in .ignore or .rgignore.

This flag implies --no-ignore-parent for source control ignore files as well.

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

When this flag is given, source control ignore files such as .gitignore are respected even if no git repository is present.

By default, ripgrep will only respect filter rules from source control ignore files when ripgrep detects that the search is executed inside a source control repository. For example, when a .git directory is observed.

This flag relaxes the default restriction. For example, it might be useful when the contents of a git repository are stored or copied somewhere, but where the repository state is absent.

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

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.

This flag limits ripgrep to searching files matching TYPE. Multiple -t/--type flags may be provided.

This flag supports the special value all, which will behave as if -t/--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.

Note that this flag has lower precedence than both the -g/--glob flag and any rules found in ignore files.

To see the list of available file types, use the --type-list flag.

Do not search files matching TYPE. Multiple -T/--type-not 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 -T/--type-not was provided for every file type supported by ripgrep (including any custom file types). The end result is that --type-not=all causes ripgrep to search in "blacklist" mode, where it will only search files that are unrecognized by its type definitions.

To see the list of available file types, use the --type-list flag.

This flag adds 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

This flag 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 this 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.

Clear the file type globs previously defined for TYPE. This clears any previously defined globs for the TYPE, but globs can be added after this flag.

Note that this must be passed to every invocation of ripgrep. Type settings are not persisted. See Configuration Files for a workaround.

This flag reduces the level of "smart" filtering. Repeated uses (up to 3) reduces the filtering even more. When repeated three times, ripgrep will search every file in a directory tree.

A single -u/--unrestricted flag is equivalent to --no-ignore. Two -u/--unrestricted flags is equivalent to --no-ignore -./--hidden. Three -u/--unrestricted flags is equivalent to --no-ignore -./--hidden --binary.

The only filtering ripgrep still does when -uuu is given is to skip symbolic links and to avoid printing matches from binary files. Symbolic links can be followed via the -L/--follow flag, and binary files can be treated as text files via the -a/--text flag.

Show NUM lines after each match.

This overrides the --passthru flag and partially overrides the -C/--context flag.

Show NUM lines before each match.

This overrides the --passthru flag and partially overrides the -C/--context flag.

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 tty, line buffering will be used by default. Forcing block buffering can be useful when dumping a large amount of contents to a tty.

This overrides the --line-buffered flag.

This flag can be disabled with --no-block-buffered.

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 matched text itself.

If ripgrep does transcoding, then the byte offset is in terms of the result of transcoding and not the original data. This applies similarly to other transformations on the data, such as decompression or a --pre filter.

This flag can be disabled with --no-byte-offset.

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 tty, 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 by default in some other circumstances as well. These include, but are not limited to:

• When the TERM environment variable is not set or set to dumb.
• When the NO_COLOR environment variable is set (regardless of value).
• When flags that imply no use for colors are given. For example, --vimgrep and --json.

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).

This flag also controls whether hyperlinks are emitted. For example, when a hyperlink format is specified, hyperlinks won't be used when color is suppressed. If one wants to emit hyperlinks but no colors, then one must use the --colors flag to manually set all color styles to none:

    --colors 'path:none' \
    --colors 'line:none' \
    --colors 'column:none' \
    --colors 'match:none'

This flag specifies color settings for use in the output. This flag may be provided multiple times. Settings are applied iteratively. Pre-existing color labels 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'

Extended colors can be used for value when the tty 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 intense and nointense styles will have no effect when used alongside these extended color codes.

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 -n/--line-number.

When -o/--only-matching is used, then the column numbers written correspond to the start of each match.

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

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 the --passthru flag. The -A/--after-context and -B/--before-context flags both partially override this flag, regardless of the order. For example, -A2 -C1 is equivalent to -A2 -B1.

The string used to separate non-contiguous context lines in the output. This is only used when one of the context flags is used (that is, -A/--after-context, -B/--before-context or -C/--context). 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.

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

The - character is the default value.

Set the field match separator. This separator is only used when printing matching lines. It is used to delimit file paths, line numbers, columns and the matching line itself. The separator may be any number of bytes, including zero. Escape sequences like \x7F or \t may be used.

The : character is the default value.

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 tty.

When stdout is not a tty, then ripgrep will default to the standard grep-like format. One can force this format in Unix-like environments by piping the output of ripgrep to cat. For example, rg foo | cat.

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

This flag prints the help output for ripgrep.

Unlike most other flags, the behavior of the short flag, -h, and the long flag, --help, is different. The short flag will show a condensed help output while the long flag will show a verbose help output. The verbose help output has complete documentation, where as the condensed help output will show only a single line for every flag.

This flag controls how ripgrep determines this system's hostname. The flag's value should correspond to an executable (either a path or something that can be found via your system's PATH environment variable). When set, ripgrep will run this executable, with no arguments, and treat its output (with leading and trailing whitespace stripped) as your system's hostname.

When not set (the default, or the empty string), ripgrep will try to automatically detect your system's hostname. On Unix, this corresponds to calling gethostname. On Windows, this corresponds to calling GetComputerNameExW to fetch the system's "physical DNS hostname."

ripgrep uses your system's hostname for producing hyperlinks.

Set the format of hyperlinks to use when printing results. Hyperlinks make certain elements of ripgrep's output, such as file paths, clickable. This generally only works in terminal emulators that support OSC-8 hyperlinks. For example, the format file://{host}{path} will emit an RFC 8089 hyperlink. To see the format that ripgrep is using, pass the --debug flag.

Alternatively, a format string may correspond to one of the following aliases: default, none, file, grep+, kitty, macvim, textmate, vscode, vscode-insiders, vscodium. The alias will be replaced with a format string that is intended to work for the corresponding application.

The following variables are available in the format string:

{path}

Required. This is replaced with a path to a matching file. The path is guaranteed to be absolute and percent encoded such that it is valid to put into a URI. Note that a path is guaranteed to start with a /.

{host}

Optional. This is replaced with your system's hostname. On Unix, this corresponds to calling gethostname. On Windows, this corresponds to calling GetComputerNameExW to fetch the system's "physical DNS hostname." Alternatively, if --hostname-bin was provided, then the hostname returned from the output of that program will be returned. If no hostname could be found, then this variable is replaced with the empty string.

{line}

Optional. If appropriate, this is replaced with the line number of a match. If no line number is available (for example, if --no-line-number was given), then it is automatically replaced with the value 1.

{column}

Optional, but requires the presence of {line}. If appropriate, this is replaced with the column number of a match. If no column number is available (for example, if --no-column was given), then it is automatically replaced with the value 1.

{wslprefix}

Optional. This is a special value that is set to wsl$/WSL_DISTRO_NAME, where WSL_DISTRO_NAME corresponds to the value of the equivalent environment variable. If the system is not Unix or if the WSL_DISTRO_NAME environment variable is not set, then this is replaced with the empty string.

A format string may be empty. An empty format string is equivalent to the none alias. In this case, hyperlinks will be disabled.

At present, ripgrep does not enable hyperlinks by default. Users must opt into them. If you aren't sure what format to use, try default.

Like colors, when ripgrep detects that stdout is not connected to a tty, then hyperlinks are automatically disabled, regardless of the value of this flag. Users can pass --color=always to forcefully emit hyperlinks.

Note that hyperlinks are only written when a path is also in the output and colors are enabled. To write hyperlinks without colors, you'll need to configure ripgrep to not colorize anything without actually disabling all ANSI escape codes completely:

    --colors 'path:none' \
    --colors 'line:none' \
    --colors 'column:none' \
    --colors 'match:none'

ripgrep works this way because it treats the --color flag as a proxy for whether ANSI escape codes should be used at all. This means that environment variables like NO_COLOR=1 and TERM=dumb not only disable colors, but hyperlinks as well. Similarly, colors and hyperlinks are disabled when ripgrep is not writing to a tty. (Unless one forces the issue by setting --color=always.)

If you're searching a file directly, for example:

    rg foo path/to/file

then hyperlinks will not be emitted since the path given does not appear in the output. To make the path appear, and thus also a hyperlink, use the -H/--with-filename flag.

For more information on hyperlinks in terminal emulators, see: https://gist.github.com/egmontkob/eb114294efbcd5adb1944c9f3cb5feda

When used with -c/--count or --count-matches, this causes ripgrep to 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.

This flag can be disabled with --no-include-zero.

When enabled, ripgrep will always 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 tty, 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, for example:

    tail -f something.log | rg foo --line-buffered | rg bar

This overrides the --block-buffered flag.

This flag can be disabled with --no-line-buffered.

Show line numbers (1-based).

This is enabled by default when stdout is connected to a tty.

This flag can be disabled by -N/--no-line-number.

Suppress line numbers.

Line numbers are off by default when stdout is not connected to a tty.

Line numbers can be forcefully turned on by -n/--line-number.

When given, ripgrep will omit lines longer than this limit in bytes. Instead of printing long lines, 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.

Prints a preview for lines exceeding the configured max column limit.

When the -M/--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 -M/--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 -M/--max-columns flag is not set, then this has no effect.

This flag can be disabled with --no-max-columns-preview.

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 -c/--count, -l/--files-with-matches and --files. This option is useful for use with xargs.

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

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.

Setting this flag to an empty string reverts it to its default behavior. That is, the path separator is automatically chosen based on the environment.

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.

An alternative spelling for this flag is --passthrough.

This overrides the -C/--context, -A/--after-context and -B/--before-context flags.

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.

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 code if no matches are found).

When --files is used, ripgrep will stop finding files after finding the first file that does not match any ignore rules.

Replaces 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.

The name of a group is formed by taking the longest string of letters, numbers and underscores (i.e. [_0-9A-Za-z]) after the $. For example, $1a will be replaced with the group named 1a, not the group at index 1. If the group's name contains characters that aren't letters, numbers or underscores, or you want to immediately follow the group with another string, the name should be put inside braces. For example, ${1}a will take the content of the group at index 1 and append a to the end of it.

If an index or name does not refer to a valid capture group, it will be replaced with an empty string.

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.

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. The order is determined by sorting files in each directory entry during traversal. This means that given the files a/b and a+, the latter will sort after the former even though + would normally sort before /.

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.

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. The order is determined by sorting files in each directory entry during traversal. This means that given the files a/b and a+, the latter will sort before the former even though + would normally sort after / when doing a reverse lexicographic sort.

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.

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

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

This flag instructs ripgrep to print 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 in its entirety more than once. For that reason, the total amount of output as a result of this flag can be quadratic in the size of the input. For example, if the pattern matches every byte in an input file, then each line will be repeated for every byte matched. For this reason, users should only use this flag when there is no other choice. Editor integrations should prefer some other way of reading results from ripgrep, such as via the --json flag. One alternative to avoiding exorbitant memory usage is to force ripgrep into single threaded mode with the -j/--threads flag. Note though that this will not impact the total size of the output, just the heap memory that ripgrep will use.

This flag instructs ripgrep to print the file path for each matching line. This is the default when more than one file is searched. If --heading is enabled (the default when printing to a tty), 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 -I/--no-filename.

This flag instructs ripgrep to never print the file path with each matching line. This is the default when ripgrep is explicitly instructed to search one file or stdin.

This flag overrides -H/--with-filename.

DEPRECATED. Use --sort=path instead.

This flag instructs ripgrep to sort search results by file path lexicographically in ascending order. Note that this currently disables all parallelism and runs search in a single thread.

This flag overrides --sort and --sortr.

This flag can be disabled with --no-sort-files.

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 unless -U/--multiline is enabled, this reports the number of lines that match and not the total number of matches. In multiline mode, -c/--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 -H/--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 -c/--count is combined with -o/--only-matching, then ripgrep behaves as if --count-matches was given.

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 -H/--with-filename flag can be used to force printing the file path in this case.

This overrides the -c/--count flag. Note that when -c/--count is combined with -o/--only-matching, then ripgrep behaves as if --count-matches was given.

Print only the paths with at least one match and suppress match contents.

This overrides --files-without-match.

Print the paths that contain zero matches and suppress match contents.

This overrides -l/--files-with-matches.

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, -l/--files-with-matches, --files-without-match, -c/--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 -o/--only-matching, --heading, -r/--replace, -M/--max-columns, etc., have no effect when --json is set. However, enabling JSON output will always implicitly and unconditionally enable --stats.

A more complete description of the JSON format used can be found here: https://docs.rs/grep-printer/*/grep_printer/struct.JSON.html.

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

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.

When this flag is enabled, all error messages related to parsing ignore files are suppressed. By default, error messages are printed to stderr. In cases where these errors are expected, this flag can be used to avoid seeing the noise produced by the messages.

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

This flag suppresses some error messages. Specifically, messages related to the failed opening and reading of files. Error messages related to the syntax of the pattern are still shown.

This flag can be disabled with --messages.

When enabled, ripgrep will print aggregate statistics about the search. When this flag is present, ripgrep will print at least 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.

This flag is always and implicitly enabled when --json is used.

Note that this flag has no effect if --files, -l/--files-with-matches or --files-without-match is passed.

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

Show trace messages. This shows even more detail than the --debug flag. Generally, one should only use this if --debug doesn't emit the information you're looking for.

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.

This overrides --type-list.

This flag instructs ripgrep to generate some special kind of output identified by KIND and then quit without searching. KIND can be one of the following values:

man

Generates a manual page for ripgrep in the roff format.

complete-bash

Generates a completion script for the bash shell.

complete-zsh

Generates a completion script for the zsh shell.

complete-fish

Generates a completion script for the fish shell.

complete-powershell

Generates a completion script for PowerShell.

The output is written to stdout. The list above may expand over time.

When set, ripgrep will 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.

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.

Show all supported file types and their corresponding globs. This takes any --type-add and --type-clear flags given into account. Each type is printed on its own line, followed by a : and then a comma-delimited list of globs for that type on the same line.

This flag prints ripgrep's version. This also may print other relevant information, such as the presence of target specific optimizations and the git revision that this build of ripgrep was compiled from.