add -l / --files-with-matches option?

[Roguelazer]

I use the -l option to grep / ack / ag / etc quite a lot to list files containing matches for further processing in a shell pipeline. Does it seem reasonable as a thing to add to ripgrep?

[BurntSushi]

Does -c/--count satisfy your use case?

[andyleejordan]

@BurntSushi at least my use case is generally ag -l something | xargs ..., so -c doesn't work without an intermediate awk or something to strip the count.

[BurntSushi]

That's reasonable. grep also has these options, so it seems fine for rg to grow them as well.

[andyleejordan]

I was looking at adding it to ucg yesterday... now I'm looking at doing it here (I do like Rust more!) (but no promises; recovering from a cold and might give up to play some video games).

[BurntSushi]

@andschwa No worries! I might actually bang this out tonight.

[andyleejordan]

@BurntSushi Hey I just got it working! Let me get some tests and docs written and cleaned up, and I'll open a PR.

[BurntSushi]

@andschwa Oh you're quick, awesome, thank you!

[andyleejordan]

@BurntSushi Working, but not finished. Right now it operates almost exactly the same as count but calls printer.path instead of printer.path_count, but doing this right I think includes terminating the search after the first match.

It also should be just as easy to add -L/--files-without-match that just sets files_with_matches and invert_match.

I also think I could share a bit more logic with count... I might open a review to ask for some refactor help.

[andyleejordan]

Tada:

$ ./target/debug/rg -l files_with_matches
src/search_buffer.rs
src/search_stream.rs
src/args.rs

[BurntSushi]

Nice!

but doing this right I think includes terminating the search after the first match.

Absolutely, yes. This will probably need to go in both of the searchers, which means making them aware of this parameter as well.

[BurntSushi]

I'd be happy to do a review. The printer is due for a bit of refactoring, so don't feel too bad about it.

[andyleejordan]

Aye yai yai... figured out with -L wasn't working (but my quick addition of --files-without-match was); it's already used for --follow, but grep uses -L for this. What do you do in this case?

[BurntSushi]

Bah. How about we prefer compatibility with grep (although I got -L from find)... Hmm...

Maybe we can just drop the short hand for --files-without-match altogether?