[nothrows]

as a long time user of `find . -name "*.foo" -exec grep -Hin {} \;` moving to ack has been great! I love the syntax and the speed and the fact that it actually respects your ignore files. ripgrep is great too. ag on the other hand is recommended by everyone but doesn't seem to respect ignores or understand modern ignore syntax. give it a pass.

https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/385

its been over 4 years... its had its chance.

[xorcist]

Spawning a separate grep for each file? That's terribly inefficient. At least use xargs which will run one process on as many files as possible.

But you know there's a -r for recursive, right? And unless you are using some historic relic of grep that is not GNU or BSD and doesn't understand the --include option you can just do:

grep -rin "needle" --include "*.foo" .

[aidenn0]

I use something along the lines of

    find . -iname '.*' -prune -o -iname '*.foo' -exec grep needle {} +

I don't want to have to learn 10 different command syntaxes for walking directory trees, so find works well. The "+" terminator of find's exec is similar to xargs, but preserves the flexibility of find's exec.

[fragmede]

At the least, I recommending moving past `find . --name '*.foo' -exec grep` pattern if you can help it.

Modern file searchers, of which `ag` is one among others, accepts `--filenametype` argument and skips the `.git` subdirectory if it exists (by default, can be toggled), so `ag --python needle` will recursively search for needle in the the current working tree in all files whos filenames end in `.py`.

Yes, you could write a function to do the same in `find`, but then you're just being stubborn. (Which is fine; my .bashrc is littered with aliases and functions of me being stubborn, but if I have to copy my .bashrc file around, I might as well install my preferred searcher to the target system if available.)

[xorcist]

Or just use "grep". It is what it's there for.

Use --include and --exclude-dirs to do what you describe. (The latter is a good idea to set in your GREP_OPTIONS, unless you actually search .git directories.)

[okdana]

GREP_OPTIONS is deprecated in GNU grep since i think 2.20. It will be removed in a future version, and until then it's going to print an irritating warning message every time you use it.

(I don't think there's any such plan for the various BSD greps, so if you use those exclusively you're probably fine.)

[petdance]

Good to know. I've been considering dropping ACK_OPTIONS, and this just might put me over the edge.

[kstrauser]

I love ag for one purpose: as a lightning quick “find other instances of the currently highlighted word” helper for Emacs. It’s great for that.