scout willibrandon

cli dotnet grep nativeaot pcre2 regex ripgrep search

Use this command to install scout:

winget install --id=willibrandon.scout -e

Scout recursively searches directory trees for regex patterns while respecting gitignore rules, hidden-file defaults, binary-file handling, and ripgrep-style output. It is a native .NET AOT implementation with statically linked PCRE2.

Scout

A feature-complete port of ripgrep to C# / .NET Native AOT.

Scout recursively searches a directory tree for a regex pattern, respecting .gitignore by default and skipping hidden and binary files. It aims to reproduce ripgrep's behavior — identical exit codes and search output — while compiling ahead-of-time to native code. It is a genuine reimplementation, not a wrapper: the regex engine, the directory walker, the glob and ignore logic, and the PCRE2 integration are all ported, so Scout behaves like ripgrep rather than calling it.

> Status: v0.1.3, tracking ripgrep 15.1.0 (commit 4857d6fa67). Functional and fully > tested — 3,230 tests pass on all six supported platforms. The release workflow publishes native > binaries, .NET tool packages, Homebrew, Scoop, and winget.

Example

$ scout -n InvariantGlobalization Directory.Build.props
15:    true

$ scout -l NativeLib native/
native/build-app-unix.sh
native/build-app-windows.ps1

Scout's command line mirrors ripgrep's: if you know rg, you know scout. Run scout --help for the full reference.

Installation

Choose one installation method:

.NET tool

dotnet tool install -g Scout

Homebrew

brew install willibrandon/tap/scout

Scoop

scoop bucket add willibrandon https://github.com/willibrandon/scoop-bucket
scoop install scout

winget

winget install willibrandon.scout

Standalone archives are attached to each GitHub Release for linux-x64, linux-arm64, osx-x64, osx-arm64, win-x64, and win-arm64. Windows releases also include MSI installers for win-x64 and win-arm64.

Building

The managed projects build with the pinned .NET 10 SDK; the scout binary additionally needs a C toolchain, since the launcher and PCRE2 are compiled and linked per platform.

Prerequisites:

.NET SDK 10.0.102 (pinned in global.json).
A C toolchain: clang on Unix; a Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt (cl.exe, link.exe, lib.exe) on Windows.
For native differentials on Windows: MSYS/Git Bash plus the decompression tools installed by eng/install-windows-host-prereqs.ps1.

# Managed unit tests:
dotnet test Scout.slnx

# Build the scout binary for your platform:
native/build-app-unix.sh osx-arm64     # -&gt; artifacts/bin/osx-arm64/ (scout + scout-real)
#   native/build-app-windows.ps1 on Windows (single scout.exe)

The differential and conformance suites additionally need the pinned ripgrep oracle and benchmark corpora; CI restores the captured oracle via eng/restore-ripgrep-oracle.*, fetches corpora via eng/fetch-corpora.sh --all, and verifies the result with eng/preflight.sh.

Supported runtimes: linux-x64, linux-arm64, osx-x64, osx-arm64, win-x64, win-arm64.

How it works

ripgrep's behavior and speed live as much in its dependencies as in its CLI, so Scout ports both. The source tree maps recognizably onto ripgrep's crates. The pieces worth knowing:

Bytes, not strings. Scout's search and output core works on ReadOnlySpan. OS arguments and paths use the platform's native form — raw bytes on Unix, UTF-16 on Windows, like ripgrep — so non-UTF-8 Unix input round-trips instead of being mangled.
A ported regex engine (Scout.Automata, after Rust's regex-automata): a byte-oriented finite-automata engine with NFA/PikeVM, lazy and dense/sparse DFAs, a meta strategy selector, and memchr/Aho-Corasick/Teddy prefilters — not the BCL Regex, whose syntax and semantics differ from the Rust crate the tests are pinned to.
PCRE2 (Scout.Pcre2), statically linked, for -P — with the same engine selection and fallback as upstream.
Native AOT. The tool compiles ahead-of-time: fast cold start, no JIT. On Unix it ships as a small C launcher (scout) that captures raw argument bytes and execs the AOT image (scout-real); on Windows, a single scout.exe.

Compatibility

Scout's contract is behavioral parity with ripgrep, checked continuously. A differential suite runs Scout and the pinned rg over a large corpus and compares exit codes and output; ripgrep's own integration tests and the regex and encoding conformance corpora run alongside it — 3,230 tests, zero skipped, on every supported platform.

Exit codes and deterministic search output match ripgrep exactly. The differential harness normalizes elapsed-time fields and nondeterministic path ordering, and has explicit presence-only checks where the upstream test only requires output to exist. stderr is intentionally Scout's own: its version banner, help text, error prefix, and --debug output identify scout, not ripgrep. Any other difference is a bug, tracked in docs/PARITY.md.

Performance

Measured against release-LTO ripgrep with hyperfine on the standard benchmark corpora (OpenSubtitles, a Linux kernel tree), Scout must meet every hosted Release Gate threshold. Wall-time ratio is Scout ÷ ripgrep; below 1.0 is faster than ripgrep.

Workload	Release gate
Literal scan, large file	≤1.20×
Regex scan, large file	≤1.20×
Recursive literal, large tree	≤1.25×
Many small files, parallel	≤1.30×
Cold start (`--version`)	≤1.00×
Cold start (tiny search)	≤1.00×

The hosted Release Gates workflow is the source of truth for observed ratios. It measures each workload in both command orders and uses combined median samples to avoid hosted-runner order bias. Resident memory carries the managed runtime's fixed image cost above ripgrep's; the accounting is documented in docs/PARITY.md.

License

Scout's own code is released under the MIT License. It is a port of ripgrep (MIT OR Unlicense) and preserves the original author's copyright; PCRE2 (BSD-3-Clause) and every other ported or bundled component have their licenses reproduced in docs/THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.