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Alternative of grep command

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grep is one of the most commonly used commands in Unix-based systems. It is used to search for specific patterns in a file or a set of files. However, sometimes the grep command may not be the most efficient or effective way to search for patterns in the data. In this blog post, we will discuss some alternatives to the grep command that can help you search for patterns more efficiently.

ack

yum install ack
sudo apt-get install ack

## Usage
ack some-keywords

ag

yum install ag
## or
git clone https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher.git
yum install automake pkgconfig pcre-devel zlib-devel xz-devel
cd the_silver_searcher
./build.sh
sudo make install

## Usage
ag some-keywords

ripgrep

sudo apt-get install ripgrep
sudo yum install ripgrep
sudo dnf install ripgrep

## Usage
rg -help

Comparing

  • ripgrep vs grep: The grep tool is a standard Linux utility that has been around for a long time and is available on almost every system. While reasonably efficient, it is not as fast as ripgrep, especially when handling Unicode searches. Additionally, it lacks some features such as the ability to restrict a search to a particular file type or ignore file names listed in .gitignore. It also does not offer user-friendly options like smart-case searching or optimized search techniques like parallel iteration. However, it does support searches based on extended regular expressions, which ripgrep does not.
  • ripgrep vs ack: ack release 3 is designed for developers searching repositories of source code and uses Perl. It is highly portable and can run on any platform that supports Perl. ack is relatively similar to ripgrep in the number of features it supports, but it is not as fast.
  • ripgrep vs Silver Searcher/ag: The Silver Searcher program is probably the best comparison for ripgrep. Both programs provide a similar set of optimization and user-friendly features. While Silver Searcher is considered quite fast, ripgrep performs better on most benchmarks, particularly on Unicode searches. Additionally, Silver Searcher uses some different search techniques than ripgrep, including lookaround.

Reference

  • https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/ripgrep-linux-installation/
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