I use RipGrep all the time, but sometimes when I want to do something I have to search the internet to find out.

GitHub - BurntSushi/ripgrep: ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore

ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore - GitHub - BurntSushi/ripgrep: ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern while respec…

GitHubBurntSushi

Well, no more! I made this cheatsheet for myself. Maybe it'll help you.

Ripgrep search for specific file types

Problem

You want to find out where the AWS ARN 123456789012 is used. You have a mono-repo with many file types in it. You're only interested in Terraform files.

Solution globbing for file types

rg '123456789012' -g '*.tf'

This globs through all files that end with .tf (the Terraform extension) for the ARN.

Problem

You want to search for the API endpoint "localhost:4531" through all Rust files.

Solution using Ripgrep's types

Ripgrep comes with a number of filetypes built in. You can do:

rg "localhost:4531" --type rust
# or more succinctly 
rg "localhost:4531" --trust

You can find the full list of file types with ripgrep --type-list.

Problem

You want to find where the ARN is used, but want to ignore all markdown files.

Solution using inverse type selection

rg '123456789012' --type-not markdown

Case insensitive

$ rg example

$ rg -i example
hello_blog
1:ExAmple

Regex support

Ripgrep supports regex search by default.

$ rg 'fast\w+' README.md
75:  faster than both. (N.B. It is not, strictly speaking, a "drop-in" replacement
119:### Is it really faster than everything else?

Literal string (no regex)

Ripgrep by default uses regex to search. Sometimes the word we want to find contains valid regex, so this is an issue.

$ rg 'hello*.'
hello_blog
3:hello.*
4:hello this is a test

We can search literally with:

$ rg -F 'hello.*'
hello_blog
3:hello.*

Show lines around the found text

Sometimes we want to search for something, and we'd like context on the found text in the file.

To find 1 line before our matched text:

$ rg "hello" -B 1
hello_blog
2-ThisIsATest
3:hello.*

To find 1 line after our matched text:

$ rg "hello" -A 1
hello_blog
3:hello.*
4-Disney

To find 1 line before and after our text:

$ rg "hello" -C 1
hello_blog
2-ThisIsATest
3:hello.*
4-Disney

Get statistics of a search

I use this to work out how much work it would be to go through my search.

So searching "crypto" would take a while. How about crypto in Python files? This helps me speed up finding things.

rg "crypto" --stats
.... (full output of the search)
1292 matches
1083 matched lines
232 files contained matches
36826 files searched
6296587 bytes printed
254562478 bytes searched
5.805867 seconds spent searching
1.559705 seconds

Exclude a directory

I do not want to search through our modules directory, only our code.

We can do this by:

$ rg crypto -g '!modules/' -g '!pypi/'

Find Files

Find all files that have the word "cluster" in them.

rg --files | rg cluster