grep Archives - LinuxLinks

Alternatives to popular CLI tools: grep

This article spotlights alternative tools to grep, a utility that searches for patterns in each file.

Clapgrep is a GUI utility which lets you search through your files.

ruplacer is a command-line tool to find and replace text in source files. This is free and open source software written in Rust.

skim is a fuzzy finder. It can be used as a general filter (like grep) or as an interactive interface for invoking commands.

pru lets you use Ruby in your pipes. Forget about grep / sed / awk / wc … It’s written in the Ruby programming language.

xlsxgrep is a CLI tool to search text in XLSX, XLS, CSV, TSV and ODS files. It works similarly to grep. Written in Python.

bingrep greps through binaries from various OSs and architectures, and colors them. This is free and open source software written in Rust.

rzgrep greps through the contents of an archive file, it also greps through any archive files that are embedded within an archive file.

ngrep is a PCAP-based tool that allows you to specify an extended regular or hexadecimal expression to match against data payloads of packets.

UniversalCodeGrep (ucg) is an extremely fast grep-like tool specialized for searching large bodies of source code.

vgrep is a pager for grep, git-grep, ripgrep and similar grep tools. It allows opening the indexed file locations in a user-specified editor.

phpgrep is both a library and a command-line tool. The library can be used to perform syntax-aware PHP code matching inside Go programs.

ack is designed as an alternative to grep for programmers. It is highly portable and runs on any platform that runs Perl.

The Silver Searcher is a tool for searching code. It started off as a clone of Ack, but their feature sets have since diverged slightly.

CGrep is a context-aware grep for source codes. It’s implemented using Clang’s libtooling libraries. Free and open source software.