Ag doesn't seem to properly print to stdout (unless I use --ackmate) when in node script about the_silver_searcher

[sjl]

This just bit me too, trying to run ag from a system() call in Vim. Magical behavior that depends on context instead of arguments is fun.

[rphillips]

Hmm .The bug is on this line https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/blob/master/src/options.c#L153

commenting it out gets the node app to work. Not sure what the right fix is for this case.

[gjtorikian]

Dang, nice find. I was starring only at print.c.

[ggreer]

Yeah, this is by design. Ag assumes that if stdin isn't a tty, it should search stdin. I'm pretty sure Ack does the same thing.

If you don't like how --ackmate messes up the formatting, use --parallel or --search-files. I added these to fix #33.

I'm thinking that if a query and a path are specified, I should default to searching files instead of stdin, regardless of whether stdin is a tty or not.

[ggreer]

It looks like ack behaves similarly to ag. I forked your gist to get the path to ag working for me and simplify the args a little. Replacing ack with ag in that gist causes this:

% node spawn.js
stderr: ack: Ignoring 1 argument on the command-line while acting as a filter.

^C%                                     

Adding -l to the params gets slightly different behavior:

% node spawn.js
stderr: ack: Can't use -l when acting as a filter.

child process exited with code 255

[ggreer]

Also, I'm not sure you had the parameters correct in your gist. Did you want to search for "." in files?

[ggreer]

ARGH GitHub! Stop auto-closing this issue.

[gjtorikian]

No, I wanted to get a listing of every file in my folder (and subfolders).

[ggreer]

So a couple of things are happening here.

1. You're telling ag to search for the pattern ".", which should match any file with at least one character in it. It will not match zero-byte files.
2. You're not specifying a path to search in, so ag assumes you want to search the current directory.
3. But you're calling ag from a script, so stdin is not a tty. Since no path is specified, ag assumes you want to search stdin instead of the current directory. Ack behaves this way as well.
4. But you're telling ag to print out just the filenames that contain matches. This only makes sense if you're searching a path, not stdin.

There are a lot of flags like -l that imply "I want to search files, not stdin." I'm not sure I want to silently search files instead of stdin if any of those flags are passed and stdin is not a tty. Either way, I can definitely see users accidentally triggering unintended behavior. I think the best course of action is to die with an error message. If users want to spawn a child process that searches a path instead of stdin, they'll have to specify the path.

Thoughts?

Also, if you just want to print the files in a directory, why not use find .?

[gjtorikian]

You're telling ag to search for the pattern ".", which should match any file with at least one character in it. It will not match zero-byte files.

That's what I want.

Also, if you just want to print the files in a directory, why not use find .?

Because I'm lazy.

Well, the real reason is that there are slight inconsistencies between BSD find and GNU find, and in the larger context I'm tired of keeping a special logic switch between the two. (For regexps, BSD uses -E, while GNU uses -regextype, to distinguish between extended/modern REs over basic ones.) Plus I get to rely on using my *ignore files instead of constructing convoluted ! -regex rules for ignores (not shown--I actually am ignoring files in subdirs.)

Thoughts?

I agree with erring with a message. Given all of the above, plus the change to options.c, I was able to achieve what I wanted. My issue was with there not being any context whatsoever as to what was going on, but the explanation makes sense to me. I think an alternative of creating a new flag just to support this is overkill.

[gjtorikian]

Problem is non existent these days.

[teamon]

I just got bitten by this when using:

while read -r x; do
  ag "..."
done <<< "..."

A message to stderr "searching stdin" would be nice to have.