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Ack

A search tool like grep, optimized for programmers

Developed by Andy Lester

Maintained by Feram GmbH Claim Stewardship

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Screenshots

  1. Screenshot

Description

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

Information

Tags search
Version 2.24
Price Free
App Website beyondgrep.com/
Sourcecode github.com/beyondgrep/ack2
Issue Tracker github.com/beyondgrep/ack2/issues
Developer Website blog.petdance.com/
License Artistic-2.0

Changelog

For more details, check out the external changelog.

  1. Ack 2.24

    Released on 2018-06-21

    • No changes since 2.23_03.
  2. Ack 2.23_03

    Released on 2018-06-15

    • Added --ts for Typescript
    • ack would stop searching if there was a file called "0" in the current directory where ack was invoked
  3. Ack 2.23_02

    Released on 2018-01-06

    • t/ack-n.t was not calling lists_match() correctly
    • Added an optimization to make ack only do a line-by-line search of a file if there's a match somewhere in the file. This gives ack a 20-30% in timings of common cases.
  4. Ack 2.22

    Released on 2017-12-22

    • No changes since 2.21_01
  5. Ack 2.00

    Released on 2013-04-17

    • By default searches all text files, as identified by Perl's `-T` operator
    • We will no longer have a `-a` switch.
    • Improved flexibility in defining filetype selectors
    • name equality ($filename eq 'Makefile')
    • glob-style matching (`*.pl` identifies a Perl file)
    • regex-style matching (`/\.pl$/i` identifies a Perl file)
    • shebang-line matching (shebang line matching `/usr/bin/perl/` identifies a Perl file)
    • support for multiple ackrc files
    • global ackrc (/etc/ackrc)
    • https://github.com/petdance/ack/issues/#issue/79
    • user-specific ackrc (~/.ackrc)
    • per-project ackrc files (~/myproject/.ackrc)
    • you can use --dump to figure which options are set where
    • all inclusion/exclusion rules will be in the ackrc files
    • ack 2.0 has a set of definitions for filetypes, directories to include or exclude, etc, *but* these are only included so you don't need to ship an ackrc file to a new machine. You may tell ack to disregard these defaults if you like.
    • In addition to the classic `--thpppt` option to draw Bill the Cat, `ack --bar` will draw (of course) Admiral Ackbar.
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