List all the files containing a phrase ====================================== 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. ``` bash 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. ``` bash rg --files-with-matches you -g "*.md" ```