In preliminary tests, this appears to run about ten times as fast as Ack. This is my attempt at a programming grep tool that is as fast as possible.
Indexing is done on triplets of ASCII characters. These are used to build a search tree for each directory in the code base, which becomes a hidden subdirectory called ".codegrep.index". The contents of this subdirectory are a list of the files searched, and the search tree split out into individual files by the decimal ASCII value of first character.
To use this, do the following.
- Put
cgrep
in your path. - Set the environment variable
CODEGREPROOT
to the root of the directory tree you want to search. - Run
build_c.sh
to build a C module that accelerates the indexer. - Run
indexer.py
to index the files to be searched. For a large code base this is going to take some time. - Now you can do searches like this:
cgrep foobar