Ripgrep Path Specifier on Ubuntu 20

Question

I want to use ripgrep on my Ubuntu 20 machine. I have installed it from various repos (apt, snap, cargo) and even built it myself but have always run into the same problem:

According to the manual one should be able to just run

rg 'pattern'

and ripgrep will just recursively search in the current working dir. However for me it always seems to expect a path specifier as well, shown by the fact that it will not find a match even if a file with the pattern is present in the top level of the current directory.

Ripgrep will only work if I do something like:

rg 'pattern' *

This would be not too much of a problem, but I intend to use ripgrep in a vim-addon which expects the behavior from the manual. So the question is: why does ripgrep behave so strangely and how do I fix the behavior?

Edit:

Running the command with the --debug flag gives the following output:

DEBUG|grep_regex::literal|grep-regex/src/literal.rs:59: literal prefixes detected: Literals { lits: [Complete(test)], limit_size: 250, limit_class: 10 }
DEBUG|globset|globset/src/lib.rs:435: built glob set; 0 literals, 0 basenames, 11 extensions, 0 prefixes, 0 suffixes, 0 required extensions, 0 regexes
DEBUG|globset|globset/src/lib.rs:435: built glob set; 0 literals, 0 basenames, 11 extensions, 0 prefixes, 0 suffixes, 0 required extensions, 0 regexes
DEBUG|globset|globset/src/lib.rs:435: built glob set; 0 literals, 0 basenames, 11 extensions, 0 prefixes, 0 suffixes, 0 required extensions, 0 regexes
DEBUG|globset|globset/src/lib.rs:435: built glob set; 0 literals, 0 basenames, 11 extensions, 0 prefixes, 0 suffixes, 0 required extensions, 0 regexes
DEBUG|globset|globset/src/lib.rs:430: glob converted to regex: Glob { glob: "**/*", re: "(?-u)^(?:/?|.*/)[^/]*$", opts: GlobOptions { case_insensitive: false, literal_separator: true, backslash_escape: true }, tokens: Tokens([RecursivePrefix, ZeroOrMore]) }
DEBUG|globset|globset/src/lib.rs:435: built glob set; 0 literals, 0 basenames, 0 extensions, 0 prefixes, 0 suffixes, 0 required extensions, 1 regexes
DEBUG|globset|globset/src/lib.rs:435: built glob set; 0 literals, 0 basenames, 11 extensions, 0 prefixes, 0 suffixes, 0 required extensions, 0 regexes
DEBUG|ignore::walk|ignore/src/walk.rs:1639: ignoring ./.cache: Ignore(IgnoreMatch(Gitignore(Glob { from: Some("./.gitignore"), original: "*", actual: "**/*", is_whitelist: false, is_only_dir: false })))

...

and then it is the same as the last line for each subfolder of my home directory.

Answer 1

Ok, so thanks to @Brian I have resolved the issue.

ripgrep has a built-in ignore logic, automatically ignoring the files it finds in .gitignore.

To save my dotfiles via git, I had setup a repository in my home directory, which by default ignores all files except the ones that I add using git add -f .... I.e. in my .gitignore file in the home directory I ignore all (*) files, which then in turn caused ripgrep to ignore them as well. I don't think that all too many will experience the same problem, but maybe this will help someone someday.