ACK!

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ACK IS A GREP-LIKE SOURCE CODE SEARCH TOOL. THE LATEST VERSION OF ACK IS V3.5.0, RELEASED 2021-03-12. Designed for programmers with large heterogeneous trees of source code, ack is written in portable Perl 5 and takes advantage of the power of Perl's regular expressions. WHAT'S NEW IN ACK 3? EASIER TO UNDERSTAND ERROR MESSAGES The error message ack displays when the regex passed is invalid has been improved. The message is more readable and includes a pointer to the offending part of the regex. For example: $ ack 'status: (open|closed|in progress' ack: Invalid regex 'status: (open|closed|in progress' Regex: status: (open|closed|in progress ^---HERE Unmatched ( in regex NEW --PROXIMATE OPTION GROUPS MATCHES NEAR EACH OTHER A new option --proximate=N groups together lines of output that are within N lines of each other in the file. This is useful when looking for matches that are related to each other. For example, these results:

15: First match

18: Second match

19: Third match

37: Fourth match

look like this with --proximate=1.

15: First match

18: Second match

19: Third match

37: Fourth match

IMPROVED -W OPTION

The -w option, which tells ack to only find whole-word matches, did not always work if your pattern began or ended with puncutation. ack would make guesses as to what your intent was, but it was not well-defined. Now, ack disallows regexes that begin or end with non-word characters. This means that if you use ack -w foo:, the new ack will not allow it, whereas ack 2.x would. ADDED -S AS A SYNONYM FOR --SMART-CASE For those without --smart-case always on, the -S will be easier for when you do want to use it. Smart-case matching makes ack do a case-insensitive search unless the pattern being matched has a capital letter in it. ADDED -I TO FORCE CASE-SENSITIVITY If you use --smart-case in your .ackrc, you can use -I to force case-sensitivity instead of having to use --no-smart-case (which still

works).

SIGNIFICANT SPEED IMPROVEMENTS Run times for ack 3 compared to ack 2.22 are 30-40% faster because of removal of unused infrastructure for plugins. NEW BUILT-IN FILETYPES ack now supports SVG, Markdown and POD by default.

HOW TO INSTALL

ack is simple to install, via CPAN, package or simple download. Read

how .

PEOPLE LOVE ACK

"Every once in a while something comes along that improves an idea so much, you can't ignore it. Such a thing is Ack, the grep replacement." Read what else people are saying . FOLLOW US ON TWITTER We're all about knowing when to move beyond the stock Unix tools. Follow us on Twitter at @beyondgrep for tips, hints and software news. Ack is copyright 2005-2018 Andy Lester , andy@petdance.com. Ack is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Artistic License v2.0

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Website design by Ashraful Sheikh and Jeana Clark (available to fork on GitHub ). Thanks to DigitalOcean for their support.