Is there anything faster than grep?

For both searching single files and huge directories of files, no other tool obviously stands above ripgrep in either performance or correctness. ripgrep is the only tool with proper Unicode support that doesn’t make you pay dearly for it.

How do I grep a large file?

Here are a few options:

1. Prefix your grep command with LC_ALL=C to use the C locale instead of UTF-8.
2. Use fgrep because you’re searching for a fixed string, not a regular expression.
3. Remove the -i option, if you don’t need it.

How long does it take to grep?

When grep is used to parse file with lines more than 1k characters long it takes almost 18 minutes to finish, while with pcregrep script finishes fairly quickly.

Is git grep faster than grep?

If you are searching in a Git repo, git grep is faster. And with Git 2.20 (Q4 2018), it is also more compatible, option-wise, with the regular grep . I often use ” grep -r $pattern ” to recursively grep a source tree.

Why is Ripgrep faster than grep?

ripgrep actually has more sophisticated literal extraction & searching than GNU grep does. Moreover, many of these optimizations are inside the regex engine itself, so even if it looks like you’re using a regex, literal optimizations may still be applied.

How do you grep fast?

Try with GNU parallel, which includes an example of how to use it with grep : grep -r greps recursively through directories. On multicore CPUs GNU parallel can often speed this up. This will run 1.5 job per core, and give 1000 arguments to grep .

How do I grep a large number of files in a directory?

Make sure that you use -exec grep PATTERN {} + , which packs as many files as it can per command invocation, and not -exec grep PATTERN {} \; , which executes grep once per file: executing the command once per file is likely to be significantly slower.

Is grep slow?

Typically grep is an efficient way to search text. However, it can be quite slow in some cases, and it can search large files where even minor performance tweaking can help significantly.

Is awk fast?

Awk is a compiled language. Your Awk script is compiled once and applied to every line of your file at C-like speeds. It is way faster than Python. If you learn to use Awk well, you will start doing things with data that you wouldn’t have had the patience to do in an interpreted language.

Why is grep slow?

If you’re running grep over a very large number of files it will be slow because it needs to open them all and read through them. If you have some idea of where the file you’re looking for might be try to limit the number of files that have to be searched through that way.

Does grep take a long time?

The grep command should take approximately the same amount of time (actually, it should be a little quicker, as it doesn’t have to print anything to the screen).