OpenBSD Handbook

Current snapshot · amd64 · Generated 2026-09-09

the_silver_searcher-2.2.0p2

code searching tool, with a focus on speed (ag)

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Description

The silver searcher (also known as ag) is a fast text searching tool similar to grep or ack. It performs faster than ack, yet is also aware of ignore files of git and mercurial repositories and does not search files listed in ignore files. It further utilises threads and advanced features of PCRE to further improve performance. * Searching for literals (no regex) uses Boyer-Moore-Horspool strstr. * Files are mmap()ed instead of read into a buffer. * Regex searches use PCRE 8.21+'s JIT compiler. * Ag calls pcre_study() before executing the regex on a jillion files. * Instead of calling fnmatch() on every pattern in your ignore files, non-regex patterns are loaded into an array and binary searched. * Ag uses Pthreads to take advantage of multiple CPU cores and search files in parallel.

Package information

Ports path
textproc/the_silver_searcher
Package architecture
amd64
Maintainer
Jeremie Courreges-Anglas <jca@wxcvbn.org>
Categories
textproc
Available flavors
None listed
Only for architectures
aarch64, amd64, arm, i386, mips64, mips64el, powerpc, powerpc64, riscv64, sparc64, alpha, hppa

These are ports metadata. Binary availability depends on the release, architecture and mirror. Build and test dependencies are not an installation checklist.

Direct dependencies

Library

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