Counting newlines in output

[tsoutsman]

Hi, this question doesn't strictly relate to ripgrep, but hopefully, it's not too off-topic.

The command rg example | wc -l counts the number of matches. According to wc documentation, -l counts the number of newlines, but the ripgrep output clearly contains more lines than matches (whitespace, file names, etc.). How does wc -l still correctly return the number of matches?

[BurntSushi]

Try comparing the output of rg example and rg example | cat. That should hopefully answer your question.

Try the same with ls and ls | cat for example.

The trick here is that tools like ripgrep and ls change their output format based on whether they're writing to a tty or not.