Global -e/-f patterns before search are silently discarded when supplied again after it #194

Summary

When patterns are supplied on both sides of the explicit search subcommand, only the child-side patterns are searched. Parent-side patterns are silently discarded. The command still exits 0 if a child pattern matches, so callers can mistake the incomplete result for a complete search.

This affects both repeated -e patterns and -f pattern files. It is different from #181, which concerned preserving the contents of one pattern file.

Reproduce

mkdir repro-pattern-scopes && cd repro-pattern-scopes
mkdir data
printf 'foo\nbar\nbaz\n' > data/input.txt
printf 'foo\n' > p1.txt
printf 'bar\n' > p2.txt

tgrep --no-index -I -e foo search -e bar -- data
rg               -I -e foo        -e bar -- data

tgrep --no-index -I -f p1.txt search -f p2.txt -- data
rg               -I -f p1.txt        -f p2.txt -- data

ripgrep has no search subcommand, so its comparison commands flatten the same two pattern inputs.

The content-search cases reproduce with --no-index, an on-disk index, and tgrep serve --no-watch.

To repeat the indexed cases, run tgrep index data, remove --no-index, and keep the directory path data. For the server cases, start tgrep serve --no-watch data in another terminal and repeat those directory searches. --stats was used in the Windows harness to verify the selected backend, including (via server).

Environment

• tgrep 1.2.0, official Windows x86_64 release.
• Source inspected at release commit 3ba6ee02537281b68ee1366bb40df9f8b7cc54f0.
• Windows; test harness run with PowerShell 7.
• ripgrep 15.1.0 (af60c2de9d).
• Verified on 2026-10-12. The shell examples describe the same fixture bytes and arguments tested on Windows.

Cause

The pattern arguments are global in tgrep-cli/src/main.rs:83. The parser reconstructs the CLI from clap's resolved matches and explicitly repairs only the boundary globals in tgrep-cli/src/main.rs:783. It then copies the resolved pattern fields into search options in tgrep-cli/src/main.rs:924.

The observed behavior indicates that the child value replaces the parent pattern collection instead of accumulating both scopes. The loss happens during argument resolution, before backend selection.

Possible fix

Accumulate pattern inputs from every command scope in their original order, without duplicating values inherited through clap's global propagation. Preserve all -e inputs and all admitted -f inputs.

A regression could check both commands above across scan, local-index, and server searches, and check that moving all patterns to one side of search preserves the same search semantics.