ack: grep but better!
I came across ack today, and now grep is sleeping outside. It’s very much like grep, except it assumes all the little things that you always wanted grep to remember, but that it never did. It actually left the light on for you, and put the toilet seat down.
Anyway, there were some rough bits with installation. On Ubuntu, it is installed by
1 | sudo apt-get install ack-grep |
If you think, hey, I will take the obvious path and install “ack”! You will be thinking with wrongitude. For
1 | ack |
is, in fact, a Kanji code converter, which I discovered after not a little anger. On RHEL, CentOS, and the like, you have to install with
1 | cpan -i App::Ack |
Once installed, just try some
1 | ack-grep STRING |
Want to ignore .svn dirs? It already did. Want to recursively search? It already did. And it brought over a bag of chips. Read the Top 10 for more goodies.
Oh, and don’t forget to add
1 | ack-grep --thpppt |
to exit your shell scripts:
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September 22, 2008 - 1:57 PM
Andy Lester
September 22, 2008 | 5:34 PMI’m glad you dig the ack. May I quote you on the ack homepage?
by Immortal Curiosity
September 22, 2008 | 11:00 PMHeh, feel free. It’s awesome!
stu42j
October 1, 2008 | 4:39 PMIt is really a shame about the naming conflict on Debian/Ubuntu. You are missing out on reason 13 from the Top 10 reasons to use ack instead of grep.
Command name is 25% fewer characters to type!
by Immortal Curiosity
October 2, 2008 | 12:31 AMI just removed the real “ack”, and made an alias from “ack” to “ack-grep”
Craig Buchek
April 29, 2009 | 12:14 PMThe CPAN command requires 2 colons:
cpan -i App::Ack
Samuel Huckins
April 29, 2009 | 12:41 PM@Craig Buchek: Thanks for the find! I thought I had that in place, guess not. Fixed now.
Ankur Patwa
October 10, 2009 | 1:10 PMI had to switch from Ubuntu to RHEL. I could not find how to install ack. This was helpful. Thanks!