ripgrep

Breaking changes

What to check before upgrading, taken from the notes of the last 30 releases.

• 14.0.0Nov 26, 2023

  BREAKING CHANGES

  • rg -C1 -A2 used to be equivalent to rg -A2, but now it is equivalent to

  rg -B1 -A2. That is, -A and -B no longer completely override -C.

  Instead, they only partially override -C.

  Build process changes:

  • ripgrep's shell completions and man page are now created by running ripgrep

  with a new --generate flag. For example, rg --generate man will write a

  man page in roff format on stdout. The release archives have not changed.

  • The optional build dependency on asciidoc or asciidoctor has been

  dropped. Previously, it was used to produce ripgrep's man page. ripgrep now

  owns this process itself by writing roff directly.

  Performance improvements:

  • PERF #1746:

  Make some cases with inner literals faster.

  • PERF #1760:

  Make most searches with \b look-arounds (among others) much faster.

  • PERF #2591:

  Parallel directory traversal now uses work stealing for faster searches.

  • PERF #2642:

  Parallel directory traversal has some contention reduced.

  Feature enhancements:

  • Added or improved file type filtering for Ada, DITA, Elixir, Fuchsia, Gentoo,

  Gradle, GraphQL, Markdown, Prolog, Raku, TypeScript, USD, V

  • FEATURE #665:
• 11.0.0Apr 15, 2019

  BREAKING CHANGES

  • ripgrep has tweaked its exit status codes to be more like GNU grep's. Namely,

  if a non-fatal error occurs during a search, then ripgrep will now always

  emit a 2 exit status code, regardless of whether a match is found or not.

  Previously, ripgrep would only emit a 2 exit status code for a catastrophic

  error (e.g., regex syntax error). One exception to this is if ripgrep is run

  with -q/--quiet. In that case, if an error occurs and a match is found,

  then ripgrep will exit with a 0 exit status code.

  • Supplying the -u/--unrestricted flag three times is now equivalent to

  supplying --no-ignore --hidden --binary. Previously, -uuu was equivalent

  to --no-ignore --hidden --text. The difference is that --binary disables

  binary file filtering without potentially dumping binary data into your

  terminal. That is, rg -uuu foo should now be equivalent to grep -r foo.

  • The avx-accel feature of ripgrep has been removed since it is no longer

  necessary. All uses of AVX in ripgrep are now enabled automatically via

  runtime CPU feature detection. The simd-accel feature does remain available

  (only for enabling SIMD for transcoding), however, it does increase

  compilation times substantially at the moment.

  Performance improvements:

  • PERF #497,

  PERF #838:

  Make rg -F -f dictionary-of-literals much faster.

  Feature enhancements:

  • Added or improved file type filtering for Apache Thrift, ASP, Bazel, Brotli,
• 0.10.0Sep 7, 2018

  BREAKING CHANGES

  • The minimum version required to compile Rust has now changed to track the

  latest stable version of Rust. Patch releases will continue to compile with

  the same version of Rust as the previous patch release, but new minor

  versions will use the current stable version of the Rust compile as its

  minimum supported version.

  • The match semantics of -w/--word-regexp have changed slightly. They used

  to be \b(?:)\b, but now it's

  (?:^|\W)(?:)(?:$|\W). This matches the behavior of GNU grep

  and is believed to be closer to the intended semantics of the flag. See

  #389 for more details.

  Feature enhancements:

  • FEATURE #162:

  libripgrep is now a thing. The primary crate is

  grep.

  • FEATURE #176:

  Add -U/--multiline flag that permits matching over multiple lines.

  • FEATURE #188:

  Add -P/--pcre2 flag that gives support for look-around and backreferences.

  • FEATURE #244:

  Add --json flag that prints results in a JSON Lines format.

  • FEATURE #321:

  Add --one-file-system flag to skip directories on different file systems.

  • FEATURE #404:
• 0.9.0Aug 3, 2018

  BREAKING CHANGES

  • When --count and --only-matching are provided simultaneously, the

  behavior of ripgrep is as if the --count-matches flag was given. That is,

  the total number of matches is reported, where there may be multiple matches

  per line. Previously, the behavior of ripgrep was to report the total number

  of matching lines. (Note that this behavior diverges from the behavior of

  GNU grep.)

  • Octal syntax is no longer supported. ripgrep previously accepted expressions

  like \1 as syntax for matching U+0001, but ripgrep will now report an

  error instead.

  • The --line-number-width flag has been removed. Its functionality was not

  carefully considered with all ripgrep output formats.

  See #795 for more

  details.

  Feature enhancements:

  • Added or improved file type filtering for Android, Bazel, Fuschia, Haskell,

  Java and Puppet.

  • FEATURE #411:

  Add a --stats flag, which emits aggregate statistics after search results.

  • FEATURE #646:

  Add a --no-ignore-messages flag, which suppresses parse errors from reading

  .ignore and .gitignore files.

  • FEATURE #702:

  Support \u{..} Unicode escape sequences.

• 0.8.0Feb 12, 2018

  BREAKING CHANGES

  Note that these are all very minor and unlikely to impact most users.

  • In order to support configuration files, flag overrides needed to be

  rethought. In some cases, this changed ripgrep's behavior. For example,

  in ripgrep 0.7.1, rg foo -s -i will perform a case sensitive search

  since the -s/--case-sensitive flag was defined to always take precedence

  over the -i/--ignore-case flag, regardless of position. In ripgrep 0.8.0

  however, the override rule for all flags has changed to "the most recent

  flag wins among competing flags." That is, rg foo -s -i now performs a

  case insensitive search.

  • The -M/--max-columns flag was tweaked so that specifying a value of 0

  now makes ripgrep behave as if the flag was absent. This makes it possible

  to set a default value in a configuration file and then override it. The

  previous ripgrep behavior was to suppress all matching non-empty lines.

  • In all globs, [^...] is now equivalent to [!...] (indicating class

  negation). Previously, ^ had no special significance in a character class.

  • For downstream packagers, the directory hierarchy in ripgrep's archive

  releases has changed. The root directory now only contains the executable,

  README and license. There is now a new directory called doc which contains

  the man page (previously in the root), a user guide (new), a FAQ (new) and

  the CHANGELOG (previously not included in release). The complete

  directory remains the same.

  Feature enhancements:

  • Added or improved file type filtering for
• 0.4.0Jan 14, 2017

  BREAKING CHANGE: The --column flag now implies --line-number.

  BREAKING CHANGE: Completely remove ^C handling from ripgrep.