All the features you expect from a modern grep alternative. RegEx - perl compatible regular expression syntax (no more escape hell) usable defaults - basic options known from grep but with usable defaults multiline support - find matches spanning over multiple lines replace - replace output to reformat it to your needs without relying on awk/sed gzip files - search through normal and gzip'ed files in one program call multiple patterns - search for multiple patterns in one run target selection - select or exclude search targets based on file name, directory name, path and type handling big data - sift handles big files without problems: files >50GB, >5,000,000,000 lines and >5,000,000,000 matches successfully tested