Ack is a grep-like tool, optimised for programmers

Re:Ack is a grep-like tool, optimised for programmers by foz on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @12:22PM (#7711025)

I used Ack a lot when I was coding Perl (it's been a while). After I switched to Ruby, I used rak [1], which seemed easier to use most of the time, and nearly identical.

However, when you just want to find stuff fast, it's annoying to have to deal with Perl/CPAN or RVM/Rubygems, especially when the dependencies are not installed on your server/workstation.

That's why I've switched to silver searcher (ag) [2], as it can be installed with any OS package manager (brew, apt, yum).

[1] http://rak.rubyforge.org [2] https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

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Re:Ack is a grep-like tool, optimised for programmers by ediblenergy on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @04:22PM (#7712439)

ag is not available as a package on debian stable. Ack is though; as ack-grep. So if you don't want to mess with CPAN that's fine. The non-CPAN instructions are right on the website.

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