ripgrep

ripgrep is a recursive text search CLI for code and other file trees. It combines regex search with ignore-file awareness, glob and file-type filters, and a structured output mode for downstream tooling.

• Search large repos or directories without manually excluding ignored, hidden, or binary content unless you explicitly want to.
• Narrow searches by glob, file type, encoding, compressed file content, or a custom preprocessor when plain recursive grep is too blunt.
• Feed match locations, context, and per-file summaries into scripts or agents through JSON Lines output for follow-up edits, triage, or reporting.

• --json emits machine-readable begin, match, context, end, and summary messages, including offsets and safe handling for non-UTF-8 paths or bytes.
• Non-interactive flags, predictable search behavior, and path or type filtering make it a strong primitive for CI checks, codebase audits, and search-then-edit loops.
• It is inspection-first: ripgrep does not modify files, and some alternate output modes such as file lists or counts cannot be combined with JSON.

• Default filtering can hide expected matches until you add flags like -u, --hidden, --text, or --follow.
• Matching is line-oriented by default; multiline or PCRE2-heavy searches are opt-in and can cost performance.