RIPGREP-ALL(1)

📦 version 0.10.10, in ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💖 RIPGREP-ALL(1) — the manual page but make it make sense 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because this is the ripgrep-all manual page (it lives in the User Commands section of your man pages, iykyk) and it is genuinely SO useful. it's rga. it's ripgrep but it does not give up at the file extension like some quitter. no cap.

✨ NAME ✨

ripgrep-all — search through PDFs, E-Books, documents and archives 🦋

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

ripgrep-all 0.10.10 — https://github.com/phiresky/ripgrep-all

rga: it's ripgrep, but it ALSO searches in PDFs, E-Books, Office documents, zip, tar.gz, etc. like... it just does. it ate and left no crumbs. 💅

🎀 USAGE: 🎀

rga [RGA OPTIONS] [RG OPTIONS] PATTERN [PATH ...]

🔥 FLAGS: 🔥

  • --rga-accurate — use more accurate but slower matching by mime type.

by default, rga matches files using file extensions. some programs, like sqlite3, literally do not care about the file extension at all, so people sometimes use any extension or no extension whatsoever. with this flag, rga will try to detect the mime type of the input files using the magic bytes (kinda like the file utility does) and use that to pick the adapter. the detection only happens on the first 8KiB of the file, because we can't always seek on the input (looking at you, archives 🙈).

  • --rga-no-cache — disable caching of results.

by default, rga caches the extracted text, if it's small enough, into a database. so repeated searches over the same set of files will be much faster. the location of the DB varies by platform:

  • ${XDG_CACHE_DIR-~/.cache}/ripgrep-all on Linux
  • ~/Library/Caches/ripgrep-all on macOS
  • C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\ripgrep-all on Windows

if you pass this flag, all caching will be disabled. all of it. gone. periodt.

  • -h, --help — prints help information
  • --rga-list-adapters — list all known adapters
  • --rga-no-prefix-filenames — don't prefix lines of files within an archive with the path inside the archive.

inside archives, by default rga prefixes the content of each file with the file path within the archive. this is usually useful, but it can cause problems, because then the inner path is ALSO searched for the pattern. sneaky.

  • --rga-print-config-schema — print the JSON Schema of the configuration file
  • --rg-help — show help for ripgrep itself
  • --rg-version — show version of ripgrep itself
  • -V, --version — prints version information

👑 OPTIONS: 👑

  • --rga-adapters=<adapters>... — change which adapters to use and in which priority order (descending).
    • "foo,bar" means use only adapters foo and bar.
    • "-bar,baz" means use all default adapters except for bar and baz.
    • "+bar,baz" means use all default adapters and also bar and baz.
  • --rga-cache-compression-level=<compression-level> — ZSTD compression level to apply to adapter outputs before storing in the cache DB.

ranges from 1 - 22. [default: 12]

  • --rga-config-file=<config-file-path> — (the manpage gives this one literally zero description, so I'm just holding it up to the light like this 🫶 it's here, it's real, that's all we know)
  • --rga-max-archive-recursion=<max-archive-recursion> — maximum depth of nested archives to recurse into.

when searching in archives, rga will recurse into archives inside archives. this option limits the depth. [default: 5]

  • --rga-cache-max-blob-len=<max-blob-len> — max compressed size to cache.

longest byte length (after compression) to store in cache. longer adapter outputs will not be cached and will be recomputed every time. 😭

allowed suffixes on command line: k M G [default: 2000000]

  • --rga-cache-path=<path> — path to store cache DB [default: /home/werdahias/.cache/ripgrep-all]
quick note bestie: -h shows a concise overview, --help shows more detail and advanced options. ✨

all other options not shown here are passed directly to rg, especially [PATTERN] and [PATH ...]. so if you already know ripgrep, you already know. iykyk. 🌈

and that's the whole page!! this was ripgrep-all 0.10.10, and the page itself is dated December 2025 — go forth and grep inside a PDF like the main character you are. mwah. 💜🎀🦋

📦 where this page comes from