Command-line utility for Linux, macOS and Windows. Reads text from files, or stdin/pipe, or from files listed in stdin/pipe, then filters the content. Filtration is based on plain (literal) text strings and/or regular expressions that can be linked to each other by logical operators. The result can be optionally checked upon the number of matches being within the expected range.

Key features:

• understands all major Unicode formats: UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE, UTF-32LE and UTF-32BE via the utf_ext package;
• one or more glob patterns for input files;
• input file paths can also be passed via stdin or a pipe;
• plain and regular expression patterns;
• logical operations on patterns: and, or, not;
• multi-line search;
• for plain patterns in a multi-line search a single space means any number of spaces, tabs and line breaks;
• allows to check the expected number of matches equals the given one, or lies within a given range.

Usage:

chest [OPTIONS]

-?,-h[elp]         - this help screen

-q[uiet]           - no output

-v[erbose]         - detailed output

-a[ll]             - scan all files including the hidden ones
                     (with the filename starting with '.')

-c[ount]           - show the number of matched lines or blocks (for the
                     multi-line match) rather than the actual text;
                     will be turned on if -e[xp[ect]] is specified

-d[ir] DIRs        - one or more directories as bases to resolve GLOBs with
                     (relative) sub-directories; see -f[iles]

-e[xp[ect]] RANGE  - expected RANGE for the number of matching lines
                     or blocks (turns -c[ount] on):
                     3   - exactly 3
                     2,5 - between 2 and 5
                     2,  - 2 or more
                     ,5  - up to 5

-m[ulti[[-]line]]  - multi-line search: applies to all patterns and converts
                     plain pattern into a regex, spaces are converted to the
                     'any number of whitespaces' pattern: [\s]+

-n[o[-]content]    - perform filtering on file paths or names
                     rather than those content

-o[ut],-format FMT - output format, the following placeholders accepted:
                     c  - number of matching lines or blocks
                     l  - sequential line number
                     f  - file name
                     p  - file path
                     s  - text (content) of the matched line(s)
                     \t - tab character
                     \n - line-break character

                     in order to use brackets, pipes, tabs or line-breaks, you
                     need to wrap FMT in single or double quotes as follows:
                     'p|m\n' or "p (l)\ts\n";

                     if none of the placeholders specified, FMT will be treated
                     as a field separator in default format)

-p[lain] TEXTs     - filter lines matching or not matching plain one or more
                     text (literal) case-sensitive patterns, has sub-options:
                     -i[case] - ignore case (case-insensitive on)
                     +i[case] - exact (case-insensitive off)
                     -and     - match prev pattern AND this one
                     -not     - next pattern should NOT be found
                     -or      - match prev patterns OR this one
                     -r[egex] - switch to -regex    



-r[egex] REGEXes   - similar to -plain, but using regular expression patterns
                     rather than plain text strings, has a sub-option -p[lain]
                     to switch back to plain text (literal)

-f[ile[s]] GLOBs   - one or more glob patterns as separate arguments,
                     case-insensitive for Windows, and case-sensitive
                     for POSIX-compliant file systems (Linux, macOS)

-x[args]           - similar to -f[iles], but takes glob patterns from stdin
                     (one per line) rather than from the command-line arguments;
                     in this case, -f[iles] ignored

Option names are case-insensitive and dash-insensitive: you can use
any number of dashes in the front, in the middle or at the back of
any option name.

EXAMPLES:

chest -dir "${HOME}/Documents" -files '**' "../*.csv" -plain -not ","
chest -d "${HOME}/Projects/chest/app" -files '**.{gz,zip}' -e 3 -o "c:p"