How do I use ag to look for text in files with certain extensions?

Question

I'm using ag (The Silver Searcher) version 0.31.0. I can easily look for a string in a bunch of files using:

localhost:workspace davea$ ag 'ftp' .

But what if I only want to scan files with certain extensions? I tried this:

localhost:workspace davea$ ag 'ftp' .java
ERR: Error stat()ing: .java
ERR: Error opening directory .java: No such file or directory

but got the errors you see above.

Gave that a whirl but got "ERR: Error stat()ing: *.java" and "ERR: Error opening directory *.java: No such file or directory" errors — Dave, Feb 08 '17 at 21:22

don_crissti · Accepted Answer · 2017-02-08T21:45:13.313

80

Per the manual, you could use ag with -G

   -G --file-search-regex PATTERN
          Only search files whose names match PATTERN.

e.g.

ag -G '\.java$' 'ftp' .

Per the same manual

   It is possible to restrict the types of files searched [...]
   For a list of supported types, run ag --list-file-types.

So you could also run

ag --java 'ftp' .

though that would restrict the search to file names ending in .java or .properties

edited Feb 08 '17 at 21:45

answered Feb 08 '17 at 21:41

don_crissti

79,330
30
216
245

2

oops sorry, deleting. – Peter Krauss Sep 17 '18 at 20:10
1

` ag -G '\.(hbs|html)$' keyword ` if you are searching multiple file extensions – Alan Dong May 09 '19 at 20:40
works perfectly with Cygwin on Windows 10 64bit. For example to search for word avg across all .xml files, I used this: ag -G '.xml' avg – alphaGeek Nov 19 '20 at 08:07

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 16 '19 at 19:54

5

As of ag version 2.2.0, you can run ag --list-file-types, which will list supported, out-of-the-box types. You can run ag "ftp" --java and search against only varying Java files.

answered Sep 16 '19 at 19:54

Sienna

265
2
7

How do I use ag to look for text in files with certain extensions?

2 Answers2