This article spotlights alternative tools to grep.
grep is a useful command to search for matching patterns in a file. If you are a system admin who needs to scrape through log files or a developer trying to find matches in a code file, grep is a powerful command to use.
The software featured here is free and published under an open source license. All tools provide a command-line interface (CLI) unless otherwise stated.
| Alternatives to grep | |
|---|---|
| ugrep | Ultra fast grep with interactive - Top 100 TUI apps |
| ripgrep | Recursively search directories for a regex pattern - Top 100 CLI apps |
| sift | Fast and powerful alternative to grep |
| The Silver Searcher | Code-searching tool similar to ack, but faster |
| ack | grep-like source code search tool |
| CGrep | Context-aware grep for source codes |
| ngrep | grep applied to the network layer |
| vgrep | Pager for grep, git-grep, ripgrep and similar grep implementations |
| xlsxgrep | Tool to search text in XLSX, XLS, CSV, TSV and ODS files |
| bingrep | grep-like tool for binaries |
| ucg | grep-like tool specialized for searching large bodies of source code |
| pru | Pipeable Ruby |
| phpgrep | Syntax-aware grep for PHP code |
| rzgrep | grep for stuff in archives that are embedded within archives |
| skim | General-purpose fuzzy finder |
| ruplacer | Find and replace text in source files |
| Clapgrep | GUI tool which offers ripgrep based full-text searches |
| repgrep | Interactive replacer for ripgrep |
| w2vgrep | Semantic grep tool |
| ast-grep | Performs structural search, lint and rewriting |
| serpl | TUI to search and replace keywords |
| grok | Tool like UNIX grep on steroids |
| osgrep | Natural-language search that works like grep |
| hgrep | grep with human-friendly search output |
| mgrep | Semantically grep everything |
| demongrep | Fast, local semantic code search |
| ck | Semantic code search |
| ferp | Clone of grep, but written in modern Fortran |
| krep | Optimized string search utility |
Have we missed any open source alternatives to grep? Please let us know!
All the CLI tools in this series.
| Alternatives to CLI tools |
|---|
| age // awk // bc // cal // cat // cd // chmod // cksum // cloc // cmp // compress // cp // cron // curl // cut // date // dd // df // diff // dig // du // fdisk // file // find // free // ftp // grep // gzip // hexdump // history // jq // kill // less // locate // ls // lsof // make // man // more // mv / ping // ps // psql // rename // rm // sed // split // ssh // stow // strings // sudo // sysctl // tail // talk // tar // telnet // time // top // touch // traceroute // tree // uname // uniq // uptime // vi // watch // Wget // who // whois // xargs |
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Instead of using grep, I use skim. It’s a neat fuzzy finder.
skim (sk) is now included. Cheers mate!
We’re really exploring CLI alternatives to grep in this roundup. In any event, DocFetcher is covered in our Desktop Search engines roundup.