Ack: A Tool like Grep but Optimized for Programmers

Posted · Category: Tools

Ack is a tool like grep, optimized for programmers. It is 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. It’s fast because it only searches the stuff it makes sense to search.
You can searches entire trees by default while ignoring Subversion, Git and other VCS directories and other files that aren’t your source code.

You spend hours every day searching through source code. Ack makes it as quick and easy as possible to do that searching and to remove as much drudgerous typing as possible. The less typing you have to do, the better. Ack costs nothing. It’s 100% free and open source under Artistic License v2.0.