ack is the replacement I wrote for grep, aimed at large trees of heterogeneous code.

Using it will change your life, but why? Here's my top 10 list:

  1. Searches recursively through directories by default, while ignoring .svn, CVS and other VCS directories.
    • Which would you rather type?
      $ grep pattern $(find . | grep -v .svn)
      $ ack pattern
  2. ack ignores most of the crap you don't want to search
    • VCS directories
    • blib, the Perl build directory
    • backup files like foo~
    • binary files
  3. Lets you specify file types to search, as in --perl or --nohtml.
    • Which would you rather type?
      $ grep pattern $(find . -name '*.pl' -or -name '*.pm' -or -name '*.pod' | grep -v .svn)
      $ ack --perl pattern
    Note that ack's --perl also checks the shebang lines of files without suffixes, which the find command will not.
  4. File-filtering capabilities usable without searching with ack -f. Want a list of all Perl files in a tree? Use ack -f --perl.
  5. Color highlighting of search results.
  6. Uses real Perl regular expressions, not a GNU subset.
  7. Allows you to specify output using Perl's special variables
    • Example: ack '(Mr|Mr?s). (Smith|Jones)' --output='$&'
  8. Many command-line switches are the same as in GNU grep:
    -w does word-only searching
    -c shows counts per file of matches
    -l gives the filename instead of matching lines
    etc.
  9. ack is pure Perl, so consistent across all platforms.
  10. Command name is 25% shorter. :-) Heck, it's 50% shorter compared to grep -r.

To install it, install the Perl module App::Ack. Your coding life will never be the same.

Visit the home page at http://petdance.com/ack

xoxo,
Andy

In reply to Top 10 reasons to start using ack by petdance

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