Ag / Grep Exact Match Only Search

Question

I am having an issue with using Ag (The Silver Searcher)...

In the docs it says to use -Q for exact match, but I don't understand why it does not work for my purposes. If I type something like ag -Q actions or ag -Q 'actions' into my terminal, it returns all instances of actions, including things like transactions and any other strings that actions is part of.

I have tried a couple other combinations of flags from the docs, including -s and -S, among others, but still I cannot get strictly strings matching just actions to return for me.

I can't get this to work with grep either. Does anyone know how I can get what I need with ag? (or even with grep)...?

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

Because ag (and grep), find files that contain something. ag -Q means to interpret the search as an exact literal string, not a fuzzy string or a regex. Okay. But a file that has the word "transactions" in it contains exactly, literally the character sequence actions. Sure, it contains more than that too, but that's not surprising.

Probably you're looking for a word-boundary search, grep '\bactions\b' or ag -w -Q actions (maybe ag -w -Q -s actions). But that is not at all the same thing as "just actions", it's a specific requirement on the things surrounding "actions" (namely that they be the beginning or end of a line, or non-letter characters). You have to tell the computer what you actually mean.