List all the files containing a phrase
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One of the most useful skills you can acquire to make you faster at almost any job that uses a computer is getting good at finding text in your current...

Date: December 31, 2021

One of the most useful skills you can acquire to make you faster at almost any job that uses a computer is getting good at finding text in your current working diretory and identifying the files that its in. I often use the silver searcher ag or ripgrep rg to find files in large directories quickly. Both have a sane set of defaults that ignore hidden and gitignored files, but getting them to list only the filenames and not the matched was not trivial to me.

│ I’ve searched throught he help/man pages many times looking for these flags and they always seem to evade me.

ag
──

Passing the flag -l to ag will get it to list only the filepath, and not the match. Here I gave it a --md as well to only return markdown filetypes. ag supports a number of filetypes in a very similar way.

```
ag nvim --md -l
```

rg
──

Giving rg the --files-with-matches flag will yield you a similar set of results, giving only the filepaths themselves and not the match statement. Also passing in the -g "*.md" will similarly yield only results from markdown files.

```
rg --files-with-matches you -g "*.md"
```