GH-SEARCH(1)

💅 GH-SEARCH — the "search all of GitHub" era ✨

okay bestie, welcome to gh-search, straight out of the GitHub CLI manual 🎀 — this is the portal that lets you search for repositories, issues, and pull requests across all of GitHub. buckle up 🦋

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🌈 SYNOPSIS

gh search <command> [flags]

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🔍 DESCRIPTION

Search across all of GitHub. yes, the whole thing. it's giving main character energy 👑

🙈 Excluding search results that match a qualifier

So in a browser, the GitHub search syntax lowkey supports excluding results that match a search qualifier — you just prefix the qualifier with a hyphen. iconic. for example, if you wanted to search for issues that do not have the label "bug", you'd use -label:bug as a search qualifier ✨

gh supports this syntax in gh search too, but ngl it needs extra command line arguments, because the hyphen would otherwise get interpreted as a command line flag (rude of it, honestly) since it begins with a hyphen 💀

On Unix-like systems, you can use the -- argument to say "hey, the arguments that follow are not a flag, they're a query string." like so:

$ gh search issues -- "my-search-query -label:bug"

On PowerShell, you have to use both the --% argument and the -- argument to get the same effect. for example:

$ gh --% search issues -- "my search query -label:bug"

See the following for more information 🫶

• GitHub search syntax: ⟨https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/getting-started-with-searching-on-github/understanding-the-search-syntax#exclude-results-that-match-a-qualifier⟩
• The PowerShell stop parse flag --%: ⟨https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.core/about/about_parsing?view=powershell-7.5#the-stop-parsing-token⟩
• The Unix-like -- argument: ⟨https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Shell-Builtin-Commands-1⟩

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✨ AVAILABLE COMMANDS ✨

• gh-search-code(1) — search within code 🧚
• gh-search-commits(1) — search for commits 🍓
• gh-search-issues(1) — search for issues 🌸
• gh-search-prs(1) — search for pull requests 💜
• gh-search-repos(1) — search for repositories ⭐

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🚪 EXIT CODES 🚪

• 0 — successful execution 🎉
• 1 — error 😭
• 2 — command canceled 🙅
• 4 — authentication required 🔐

NOTE: specific commands may have additional exit codes. refer to the command's help for more information 💅

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👀 SEE ALSO

• gh(1)

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that's the whole vibe, bestie 💖 this page is from GitHub CLI v2.102.0, dated Oct 2026 — go forth and search, no cap 🫶🌈