Introduction: what is pss?

pss is a power-tool for searching inside source code files. pss searches recursively within a directory tree, knows which extensions and file names to search and which to ignore, automatically skips directories you wouldn’t want to search in (for example .git or .svn), colors its output in a helpful way, and does much more.

If you’re familiar with the ack tool, then you will find pss very similar (see https://github.com/eliben/pss/wiki/pss-and-ack).

Pre-requisites

pss needs only Python to run. It’s being tested with several of the latest Python 3.x versions on Linux, Mac OS and Windows. Earlier versions of Python 3.x may work as well, but this isn’t guaranteed. Python 2 is no longer supported (but you may download pss version 1.43 or older if you need it to work with Python 2).

Installing

pss can be installed from PyPI (Python Package Index):

> pip install pss

Alternatively, you can download the source distribution either from PyPI or from the main Github project page. When you unzip the source distribution, run:

> python setup.py install

Running without installing

pss supports direct invocation even without installing it. This may be useful if you’re on a machine without administrator rights, or want to experiment with a source distribution of pss.

Just unzip the pss distribution into some directory. Let’s assume its full path is /path/to/pss. You can now run:

> /path/to/python /path/to/pss

And this will invoke pss as expected. This command can also be tied to an alias or placed in a shell (or batch) script for convenience.

How to use it?

pss is meant to be executed from the command line. Running it with no arguments or with -h will print a detailed usage message.

For some detailed usage examples, check out the Usage wiki page - https://github.com/eliben/pss/wiki/Usage-samples

License

pss is open-source software. Its code is in the public domain. See the LICENSE file for more details.