Creating and using ackrc

ack is a fantastic replacement for grep and probably much more than grep. Here is what the dnf info has to say about ack

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Name         : ack
Architecture : noarch
Summary      : Grep-like text finder
URL          : http://beyondgrep.com/
License      : Artistic 2.0
Description  : Ack is designed as a replacement for grep.

And their websites says -

Designed for programmers with large heterogeneous trees of source code, ack is written in portable Perl 5 and takes advantage of the power of Perl’s regular expressions.

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ack on solaris – grep recursively.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff;">Some days back I posted an article on ack <a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/2009/08/24/more-powerful-grep-ack/" target="_blank">here. Today I was working on Solaris 9 and the default grep installed on the system does not have the &#8221;-r&#8221; option to search recursively. So, you know for all the time I had to keep using find with grep to work with directories recursively. This was something similar to the one below:

<span style="background-color: #ffffff;">find . -type f -exec grep amit {} \;

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more powerful grep – ack

For last couple of days, I have been using ack instead of grep. Here is description of ack:

Ack is designed as a replacement for grep.

There are couple of reasons I am using ack. First and foremost being it does not require a filename. So, for seaching amit in all files recursively under the current directory I can simply use

ack amit

More reasons to use ack:

It supports pager option and there can be a rc file that can be used to define the default options that needs to be used with ack. Here is the contents of my $HOME/.ackrc file.

vim search multiple files

Searching some pattern in multiple files is something that is required very often. There are multiple ways to do it, like <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/grep" title="Grep" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep">grep, <a class="zem_slink freebase/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000006b66ec6" title="Ack (command-line utility)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ack_%28command-line_utility%29">ack, find and so on so forth. But if your editor already has the capability to do that, then why leave your favourite vi and go to shell. I will point you to some scripts and some wiki pages on how to do this 🙂