ack, a better grep

Sunday, 25 January 2009 | brad hards

One of the many things I learned at linux.conf.au was about ack. Thanks to Paul Fenwick for bringing it to our attention. Spend a few minutes with me on this...

If you are a fan of grep (especially with -drecurse), but hate seeing the .svn directories and contents of the object files, you need ack.

Colourised outputs, highlighting, nice organisation, awesome configurability are all bonuses. Even has documentation.

Packages exist for at least Debian and Fedora. Portable (perl), installable using CPAN.

Less to type. What more could you ask for?

Example (without colour, sorry): bradh-dev@saxicola:~/kde/src/kdesupport/akonadi$ ack AkonadiServer server/src/akonadi.cpp 53:static AkonadiServer s_instance = 0; 55:AkonadiServer::AkonadiServer( QObject parent ) 130:AkonadiServer::~AkonadiServer() 134:void AkonadiServer::quit() 187:void AkonadiServer::doQuit() 192:void AkonadiServer::incomingConnection( quintptr socketDescriptor ) 201:AkonadiServer * AkonadiServer::instance() 204: s_instance = new AkonadiServer(); 208:void AkonadiServer::startDatabaseProcess() 338:void AkonadiServer::stopDatabaseProcess() 346:void AkonadiServer::serviceOwnerChanged(const QString & name, const QString & oldOwner, const QString & newOwner)

server/src/main.cpp 40: qDebug( "Shutting down AkonadiServer..." ); 42: Akonadi::AkonadiServer::instance()->quit(); 67: Akonadi::AkonadiServer::instance(); // trigger singleton creation 75: Akonadi::AkonadiServer::instance()->quit();

server/src/akonadi.h 39:class AKONADIPRIVATE_EXPORT AkonadiServer: public QLocalServer 44: static AkonadiServer* instance(); 46: AkonadiServer( QObject *parent = 0 ); 47: ~AkonadiServer();