ucg – fast grep-like tool specialized for searching large bodies of source code

UniversalCodeGrep (ucg) is an extremely fast grep-like tool specialized for searching large bodies of source code.

It is intended to be largely command-line compatible with Ack, to some extent with ag, and where appropriate with grep. Search patterns are specified as PCRE regexes.

ucg is intended to address the impatient programmer’s code searching needs. ucg takes advantage of the concurrency (and other) support of the language to increase scanning speed while reducing reliance on third-party libraries and increasing portability. Regex scanning is provided by the PCRE2 library, with its JIT compilation feature providing a huge performance gain on most platforms. Directory tree traversal is performed by multiple threads, reducing the impact of waiting for I/O completions. Critical functions are implemented with hand-rolled vectorized (SSE2/4.2/etc.) versions selected at program load-time based on what the system supports, with non-vectorized fallbacks.

Invoking ucg is the same as with ack or ag:

ucg [OPTION...] PATTERN [FILES OR DIRECTORIES]

...where PATTERN is a PCRE-compatible regular expression.

If no FILES OR DIRECTORIES are specified, searching starts in the current directory.

Website: github.com/gvansickle/ucg
Support:
Developer: Gary R. Van Sickle
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

ucg is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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