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Add to SafariWhen comparing Grep vs The Platinum Searcher (pt), the Slant community recommends Grep for most people. In the question“What are the best open source tools for searching source code?” Grep is ranked 3rd while The Platinum Searcher (pt) is ranked 10th.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Preinstalled on every Unix like system
Pro Searches any text file
Pro Reads from STDIN
You can search the output of any command just by piping into grep.
Pro Searches multiple files
It is possible to instruct grep to search through multiple files specified on the command line or entire directory trees.
Pro Full PCRE regex support
Pro Fast
Searches through large collections of files well before the expected time.
Pro Works with Atom
Pro Fully configurable
Can define specific configuration in each directory using .ptconfig.toml.
Pro Golang
Writing fully in Go.
Pro Very fast
3–5× faster than ack. Slightly faster than ag.
Cons
Con Hard to filter by file type
Want to search for my_function in PHP files only? find . -name '*.php' -exec grep my_function '{}' ;
Con Multiple, not fully compatible, implementations
The most known 2 are: BSD and GNU implementations which slightly differ in their capabilities and performance.
Con Uneven performance between implementations
Con No package for standard Linux distribution
