ack = a better grep "ignores most of the crap you don't want to search"

If you’ve ever use grep to search a svn directory you’ll know the issues re .svn folders, easiest solution is to use ack

Why

ack is a tool like grep, optimized for programmers Andy Lester http://betterthangrep.com

How to install

curl http://betterthangrep.com/ack-standalone >  ~/bin/ack &&; chmod 0755 !#:3

Top reasons to use ack instead of grep

• It’s blazingly fast because it only searches the stuff you want searched.
• ack is pure Perl, so it runs on Windows just fine.
• The standalone version uses no non-standard modules, so you can put it in your ~/bin without fear.
• Searches recursively through directories by default, while ignoring .svn, CVS and other VCS directories.
• ack ignores most of the crap you don’t want to search
  • VCS directories
  • blib, the Perl build directory
  • backup files like foo~ and #foo#
  • binary files, core dumps, etc
• Ignoring .svn directories means that ack is faster than grep for searching through trees
• Lets you specify file types to search, as in –perl or –nohtml
  • ack -f --perl > all-perl-files
• Color highlighting of search results

Examples

Which would you rather type?

$ grep pattern $(find . -type f | grep -v '\.svn')

or

$ ack pattern

also

grep pattern $(find . -name '*.pl' -or -name '*.pm' -or -name '*.pod' | grep -v .svn)

versus

ack --perl pattern

• Note that ack’s --perl also checks the shebang lines of files without suffixes, which the find command will not