Andy Lester’s ack — a better grep than grep + bonus: “stuff being destroyed” download video)
My programmer friends are giving ack high marks. Ack (created by Perl guru Andy Lester) is a fext file search utility that understand file hierarchies. It’s way more powerful and flexible than the standard Unix/Linux grep. Here’s what one code jockey has to say about ack:
[tease]
I tried ack out and it’s really excellent. Now all I have to do is teach myself to quit typing grep.
My only complaint was that it did not have a flag for searching Lua files. So I wrote the author and he added support for Lua within 10 minutes of the request.
Incidentally, the ack author spoke at a Perl conference I went to in Minneapolis a couple months ago.
Before his talk he showed an unbelievable video montage of stuff getting destroyed by having beer cans and other misc projectiles shot from a cannon at them. I asked him about that and he gave me the link for it too.
Worth a download…