My own grep in Python.
I made it because none of the greps for Windows I could find worked right. One that I found a long time ago, that I think did recursive directory searching before GNU's did, often crashes, and some regex patterns don't match things that they should match. Another one that I found more recently, but is still a port of a relatively old version of GNU grep, just hangs whenever I try to do recursion. And I figured making a simple one in Python that does what I need ought to be easy. Then I started adding more and more features because it was so easy.
- Can just list all matching files without a regex
- Can specify a list of paths to search
- Can specify a list of paths to exclude from search
- Can make filename matching case-sensitive even on OSs where that's not the standard
- Can make "." match newlines
- Has colorized output, even on Windows if colorama is installed
- Can enable or disable color, set your own colors, or load the defaults
- Show characters less than 32 other than \n and \r as colorized escape codes, with an option to pass ANSI color codes through unchanged
- Can remember all color-related settings
(Actually, I don't know how many of those things are available in the latest GNU grep.)
Other, standard grep functions it can do are
- show only files that don't match
- show only matching files, no match text
- show line numbers
- case-insensitive search
- match only up to a certain number of lines
- search directories recursively
- search directories recursively ignoring symlinked directories
- specify number of lines of context before and after matches, either separately or both at once
I've only tested it a little bit on Linux (I'm a Windows user), but it should work on any OS.
If you're on Windows, grep.py will not show color unless you pip install colorama.
The way path exclusion works, say your search criteria includes these directories, probably because you're using -r or -R
d:\temp
d:\foo
d:\a\bar\baz
--x_files d:\temp foo bar\baz will exclude d:\temp, d:\foo, and d:\a\bar\baz
Similarly, -R (excludes symlinked directories except those explicitly included) with -p baz will include a\bar\baz if you're searching from a even if a\bar\baz is a symlink, for better or worse.
The way recursion works is, say you do grep.py -r d:\*.html *.txt *.md -p d:\foo\bar --x_files robots.txt index.html
It will search d:\ recursively, but only searching for *.html. It will exclude index.html.
It will search d:\foo\bar recursively for *.txt and *.md and will exclude robots.txt.
In other words, it searches the combinatorial product of all the file specs and paths given, minus the combinatorial product of all the specs and paths for exclusion given, except for file specs of the form path\filespec, for which it searches only that path recursively for filespec, minus any filespecs or paths given for exclusion. path\filespec also abides by -r vs -R and includes symbolically linked paths if they're specified it the paths list in the case of -r.
grep.py will search the current directory by default, but if any paths are specified, it will exclude the current directory (unless the current directory is one of the paths specified).
All this in less than 400 lines of Python.