Feautures

It's fast. really fast.

Some grep alternatives try to be fast by not searching everywhere. sift was developed with performance in mind and just is fast. Take a look at the benchmarks for details.

No installation

sift comes as a single executable with no dependencies and is available for all major platforms (Linux, Windows, OS X, BSD) Need to use sift on a remote server? Just copy it over and it will work - no problems due to missing packages.

Flexiblity. all the features you expect from a modern grep alternative.

• RegEx - perl compatible regular expression syntax (no more escape hell)
• usable defaults - basic options known from grep but with usable defaults
• multiline support - find matches spanning over multiple lines
• replace - replace output to reformat it to your needs without relying on awk/sed
• gzip files - search through normal and gzip'ed files in one program call
• multiple patterns - search for multiple patterns in one run
• target selection - select or exclude search targets based on file name, directory name, path and type
• handling big data - sift handles big files without problems: files >50GB, >5,000,000,000 lines and >5,000,000,000 matches successfully tested
• customizable - optional global and local configuration file to specify your own preferences

Use Conditions

Doing code audits? Need to extract data from complex formats? sift will make this much easier. You may specify various conditions and only get matches.

• preceded by A
• followed by B within X lines
• if the file also contains a line with C
• if the file contains D in the first Y lines
• any combination of the available conditions