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 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 |
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I’m glad you dig the ack. May I quote you on the ack homepage?
Heh, feel free. It’s awesome!
It 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!
I just removed the real “ack”, and made an alias from “ack” to “ack-grep”
The CPAN command requires 2 colons:
cpan -i App::Ack
@Craig Buchek: Thanks for the find! I thought I had that in place, guess not. Fixed now.
I had to switch from Ubuntu to RHEL. I could not find how to install ack. This was helpful. Thanks!
Awesome tool, thanks for the CentOS installation tip!
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Ack-grep saved my life several times. I’m using it extensively on my iPhone development.
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/ack-grep-a-grep-like-program-specifically-for-large-source-trees.html/comment-page-1#comment-49837
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