http://betterthangrep.com/
>From the website (taken with a grain of salt). ********************************************************* 1. It's *blazingly fast* because it only searches the stuff you want searched. 2. ack is pure Perl, so it *runs on Windows* just fine. 3. The standalone version <http://ack.googlecode.com/svn/tags/latest/ack>uses no non-standard modules, so you can put it in your ~/bin without fear. 4. Searches recursively through directories by default, while ignoring .svn, CVS and other VCS directories. - Which would you rather type? $ grep pattern $(find . -type f | grep -v '\.svn') $ ack pattern 5. ack *ignores most of the crap you don't want to search* - VCS directories - *blib*, the Perl build directory - backup files like *foo~* and *#foo#* - binary files, core dumps, etc 6. Ignoring .svn directories means that *ack is faster than grep* for searching through trees. 7. *Lets you specify file types to search*, as in --perl or --nohtml. - Which would you rather type? $ grep pattern $(find . -name '*.pl' -or -name '*.pm' -or -name '*.pod' | grep -v .svn) $ ack --perl pattern Note that ack's --perl also checks the shebang lines of files without suffixes, which the find command will not. 8. File-filtering capabilities usable without searching with ack -f. This lets you *create lists of files of a given type*. $ ack -f --perl > all-perl-files 9. *Color highlighting* of search results. 10. Uses *real Perl regular expressions*, not a GNU subset. 11. Allows you to specify output using Perl's special variables - Example: ack '(Mr|Mr?s)\. (Smith|Jones)' --output='$&' 12. Many command-line switches are the same as in GNU grep: -w does word-only searching -c shows counts per file of matches -l gives the filename instead of matching lines etc. 13. *Command name is 25% fewer characters to type!* Save days of free-time! Heck, it's 50% shorter compared to grep -r. *********************************************************
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