pipe rg filenames into to itself

[chuanqisun]

Dear ripgrep maintainers,

I currently use multiple ripgrep executions to emulate the "AND" logic operator, like this:

rg foo -l --null-data | xargs -0 rg bar -l --null-data | xargs -0 rg magic ...

This technique works well for me but I was hoping to remove the dependency on xargs so I can ship my code to windows and linux without adding platform specific utils.

I am using -l because I hope to search the entire file, not just the previously matched lines.

My question is

1. Is there a way to pipe rg's output into itself without additional dependencies?
2. If not, would you be willing to extend rg so we can get an output that is compatible with the expected input format?

I feel -0, --null-data, and --crlf already manipulate line terminators, so it could be a small change.

Thanks for the amazing work.

[chuanqisun]

I'm sorry I just realized a bigger problem is the positioning of the argument, instead of the line terminators. When using pipe, rg cannot treat the input as filenames unless I manipulate it with xargs. I'm curious if there is any workaround for this. Again I'm sorry I have understated the problem here.

[BurntSushi]

Thanks for the question.

There is an issue tracking boolean matching that would permit one to express things like "matches foo and bar," but that's intended to work at a line level. Working at the file level as you describe here is a different endeavor, and no, there are no plans to add support for this use case to ripgrep. Using xargs with a pipeline is the best solution. But if you need to do this on Windows, you can, it will just be more verbose.

I don't understand your suggestion about line terminators. I don't see how that would resolve your problem. Please provide an example of what would solve your problem.

As a small side note, you can solve a subset of cases via a multiline regex. For example, to match both foo and bar, you would use (?s)foo.*bar|bar.*foo. But the size of the regex obviously grows quite quickly as you add more patterns.

[chuanqisun]

Thanks for the pro tip on the New Years Eve! Please dismiss the line terminator question. I didn't understand xargs when I asked it. I should have read the man page more carefully.

Cheers!