Use grep? Try ack!

For you command line addicts like myself.

I find myself using grep constantly to search within files. Most often in the format ‘grep -r “phrase” * | grep -v .svn’ To search subdirectories, and then filter out any subversion files. Which sucks.

I recently stumbled upon ‘ack’, which is a similar search function, but with a whole lot more features, and way faster by default.

With it, I only need to type ‘ack “phrase” *’ to get the same result. Neat!

Some reasons to use ack:

• Ignores subversion directories by default.
• Color highlighting of matches.
• Full perl regular expression search capable
• type specific filtering with –php, –perl, etc
• Regular expression based file matching

It’s neat. Check it out: http://petdance.com/ack/