Perplexity Launches pplx — Single-Binary CLI Tool with Search API for Terminal and AI Agents

Perplexity has released pplx, an official command-line tool for its Search API. It returns justified search results and extracted page text in JSON format. According to the documentation, the tool is designed for both humans and code agents. pplx is not a chat client: it has no dialogue mode, model selection, or synthesized response. The tool provides two main commands: pplx search web performs internet searches, and pplx content fetch extracts text from a URL. A successful call returns exit code 0 and exactly one JSON object on stdout; on error, it returns exit code 1, empty stdout, and one JSON error object on stderr. Installation is done with a single curl-pipe-sh command, without sudo. Three platforms are supported: macOS on Apple Silicon, Linux x86_64, and Linux arm64. There are no builds for Windows or Intel macOS. A key feature for agents is token management: the --output-dir and --stdout-preview parameters allow saving full results and truncating long lines in stdout, but truncation only works when a save directory is also specified. For the content fetch command, a validation check has been added: before using the content, the error and is_paywall fields must be checked. The --html option adds raw HTML, and --no-cache forces a live request. The Search API costs $5 per 1000 requests, with a limit of 50 queries per second (QPS) on all plans.