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nimgrep User's manual

:Author: Andreas Rumpf :Version: 1.6.0

.. default-role:: option .. contents::

Nimgrep is a command line tool for search and replace tasks. It can search for regex or peg patterns and can search whole directories at once. User confirmation for every single replace operation can be requested.

Nimgrep has particularly good support for Nim's eccentric style insensitivity (see option -y below). Apart from that it is a generic text manipulation tool.

Installation

Compile nimgrep with the command:

  nim c -d:release tools/nimgrep.nim

And copy the executable somewhere in your $PATH.

Command line switches

.. include:: nimgrep_cmdline.txt

Path filter options

Let us assume we have file dirA/dirB/dirC/file.nim. Filesystem path options will match for these parts of the path:

option	matches for
`--[not]extensions`	`nim`
`--[not]filename`	`file.nim`
`--[not]dirname`	`dirA` and `dirB` and `dirC`
`--[not]dirpath`	`dirA/dirB/dirC`

Combining multiple filter options together and negating them

Options for filtering can be provided multiple times so they form a list, which works as:

positive filters --filename, --dirname, --dirpath, --inContext, --inFile accept files/matches if any pattern from the list is hit
negative filters --notfilename, --notdirname, --notdirpath, --notinContext, --notinFile accept files/matches if no pattern from the list is hit.

In other words the same filtering option repeated many times means logical OR.

.. Important:: Different filtering options are related by logical AND: they all must be true for a match to be accepted. E.g. --filename:F --dirname:D1 --notdirname:D2 means filename(F) AND dirname(D1) AND (NOT dirname(D2)).

So negative filtering patterns are effectively related by logical OR also: (NOT PAT1) AND (NOT PAT2) == NOT (PAT1 OR PAT2):literal: in pseudo-code.

That means you can always use only 1 such an option with logical OR, e.g. --notdirname:PAT1 --notdirname:PAT2 is fully equivalent to --notdirname:'PAT1|PAT2'.

.. Note:: If you want logical AND on patterns you should compose 1 appropriate pattern, possibly combined with multi-line mode (?s):literal:. E.g. to require that multi-line context of matches has occurrences of both PAT1 and PAT2 use positive lookaheads ((?=PAT):literal:):

 ```cmd
 nimgrep --inContext:'(?s)(?=.*PAT1)(?=.*PAT2)'
 ```

Meaning of `^`:literal: and `$`:literal:

nimgrep:cmd: PCRE engine is run in a single-line mode so ^:literal: matches the beginning of whole input file and $:literal: matches the end of file (or whole input string for options like --filename).

Add the (?m):literal: modifier to the beginning of your pattern for ^:literal: and $:literal: to match the beginnings and ends of lines.

Examples

All examples below use default PCRE Regex patterns:

To search recursively in Nim files using style-insensitive identifiers:

nimgrep --recursive --ext:'nim|nims' --ignoreStyle
# short: -r --ext:'nim|nims' -y

.. Note:: we used ' quotes to avoid special treatment of | symbol

for shells like Bash

To exclude version control directories (Git, Mercurial=hg, Subversion=svn) from the search:

nimgrep --notdirname:'^\.git$' --notdirname:'^\.hg$' --notdirname:'^\.svn$'
# short: --ndi:'^\.git$' --ndi:'^\.hg$' --ndi:'^\.svn$'

To search only in paths containing the tests:literal: sub-directory recursively:

nimgrep --recursive --dirname:'^tests$'
# short: -r --di:'^tests$'
# or using --dirpath:
nimgrep --recursive --dirpath:'(^|/)tests($|/)'
# short: -r --pa:'(^|/)tests($|/)'

Nimgrep can search multi-line, e.g. to find files containing import:literal: and then strutils:literal: use pattern 'import(.|\n)*?strutils':literal:.

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