Does --quiet --files actually terminate immediately?

[roblourens]

VS Code is using a command like rg --quiet --files -g '**/package.json' to test whether a workspace contains a certain type of file. Investigating microsoft/vscode#48599, it seems like ripgrep doesn't actually terminate early when the --quiet flag is used.

One way I'm testing this, in the ripgrep repo:

$ rg --quiet --files --debug 2> quiet.txt
$ rg --files --debug 2> notquiet.txt
$ ls -l quiet.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 roblou  staff  18067 May  2 20:22 quiet.txt
$ ls -l notquiet.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 roblou  staff  18067 May  2 20:22 notquiet.txt

I'd expect the --quiet version to terminate immediately after one file is found, and leave a shorter log behind.

In the original issue, rg runs for a long time despite the debug log showing that it saw a package.json file very early.

[BurntSushi]

The docs for --quiet say that if a match is found in a file, then ripgrep will stop searching. But if no match is found, then it continues. So with respect to the docs, the behavior you're inquiring about is unspecified, since the --files flag doesn't actually do any searching.

With that said, it seems like this is definitely a reasonable interpretation and use of --files. :-)