Extending Column Background Color--without Images! | Home | We're Looking For The Lone Wolf McQuade Of PHP Development

Filed under Quick Tips on July 17, 2008 by Chris Dary

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/

Post a Comment Digg Del.icio.us

Trackback Pings (TrackBack URL for this entry)

http://www.arc90.com/cgi-bin/mt4/mt-tb.cgi/173.

Comments

Thanks for the tip! This is a nice evolution over grep.

Gentoo users: there is an ebuild coming out http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=220645

Posted on July 23, 2008 2:11 PM by Jonah Braun

Post a Comment:

Extending Column Background Color--without Images! | Main | We're Looking For The Lone Wolf McQuade Of PHP Development