Paul Roub

I've fallen in love with a new tool known as ack. It's basically grep, the way I want grep to work when coding:

• Full Perl regular expressions
• Iterates over directories by default
• Skips source control directories (q.v.)
• Easily restricted to certain file types

So if I'm searching a tree of Perl files, instead of something like:

grep pattern $(find . -name '*.pl' -or -name '*.pm' -or -name '*.pod' | \
  grep -v _sgbak)

(to find Perl program, module, and POD files, skipping anything in Vault/Fortress _sgbak folders), I can just say:

ack --perl pattern

And yes, as of version 1.74, ack includes Vault and Fortress in its list of supported version control tools. So if I want to see references to the explodeMinion46 function, I can just say:

ack explodeMinion46

To recursively search my current directory, avoiding backup files along the way.

There are a number of other options, including configuring your own exclusions, etc. on the fly -- but for me, the out-of-the-box behavior is now exactly what I want.