Today I Learned Ack

#

This is the first post in a series where I've decided to go through a trove of other people's Today I Learned or TILs and write up my selections for each topic.

To kick things off I will start with a nice new tool called ack. It's beyond grep which so far has lived up to its claim of being better for programmers and very fast.

ack --bar #

The ack utility has a fun Easter egg that dumps a Star Wars meme to the command line. Give it a try.

ack --bar

See man ack for more details.

Case-Insensitive Search #

Use the -i flag to perform a case-insensitive search with ack.

ack -i easter

ack/ack-bar.md
3:The [`ack`](https://beyondgrep.com/) utility has a fun Easter egg that dumps

postgres/configure-the-timezone.md
18:Eastern time.

If you are a Vim user, you may be familiar with smart-case. The --smart-case option is a related Ack feature worth checking out.

See man ack for more details.

List Available File Types #

The ack utility allows you to filter the searched files based on file type. If you'd like to know all of the file types available, you can use the --help=types flag. This will include file types you've specified in your .ackrc file.

Here is a sample of some of the output.

ack --help=types
    ...
    --[no]css          .css .less .scss
    --[no]dart         .dart
    --[no]delphi       .pas .int .dfm .nfm .dof .dpk .dproj .groupproj .bdsgroup .bdsproj
    --[no]elisp        .el
    --[no]elixir       .ex .exs
    --[no]erlang       .erl .hrl
    --[no]fortran      .f .f77 .f90 .f95 .f03 .for .ftn .fpp
    --[no]go           .go
    --[no]groovy       .groovy .gtmpl .gpp .grunit .gradle
    --[no]haskell      .hs .lhs
    --[no]hh           .h
    --[no]html         .html .mustache .handlebars .tmpl
    --[no]jade         .jade
    --[no]java         .java .properties
    --[no]js           .js
    ...

See man ack for more details.

Search Files Specific to a Language #

The ack command makes it easy to narrow the set of searched files to those of a specific programming language. For instance, if you have a rails project and only want to search the ruby files, use the --ruby flag with your ack command.

ack --ruby Active

With the --ruby flag, I get a manageable number of results. Without it, not so much.

ack --ruby Active | wc -l
      26
ack Active | wc -l
    5253

See man ack for more details.

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