ack is a tool like grep, designed for programmers with large trees of heterogeneous source code.
ack is a tool like grep, designed for programmers with large trees of heterogeneous source code. http://beyondgrep.com
Questions tagged [ack]
262 questions
123
votes
10 answers
How to truncate long matching lines returned by grep or ack
I want to run ack or grep on HTML files that often have very long lines. I don't want to see very long lines that wrap repeatedly. But I do want to see just that portion of a long line that surrounds a string that matches the regular expression. How…
dan
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77
votes
1 answer
Ignoring a directory using ack's .ackrc
I'm not sure what it's for, but the code I'm working on has a bunch of folders called "save.d," it looks like they're used for some sort of version control (we also have .svn folders).
How can I update my .ackrc file to ignore those directories by…
Parris Varney
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74
votes
9 answers
How can I install and use ack library on Windows?
I have never used Perl, but I am really impressed by the ack, which I would like to use for source code searching, etc.
Can anyone guide me of how to make use of this excellent library on Windows?
rajesh pillai
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63
votes
5 answers
How do you exclude a specific file from ack (ack-grep)?
With the normal grep command there is an --exclude option (covered in detail here: Use grep --exclude/--include syntax to not grep through certain files) that lets you ignore specific files when you are grepping.
Ack's --type option takes care of…
machineghost
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60
votes
5 answers
How to do search & replace with ack in vim?
I am using the Ack plugin in Vim, which helps me to quickly search for strings in my project. However, sometimes I want to replace all or some occurrences of the found strings. You can do some kind of global search and replace using the Vim arglist…
Ralph von der Heyden
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55
votes
2 answers
ack: Excluding only one directory but keeping all others with the same name
My folder structure looks like this:
/app
/app/data
...
/app/secondary
/app/secondary/data
I want to recursively search /app, including /app/data. I do not want to search /app/secondary/data however. This what I have so far:
ack --ignore-dir=data…
mattalxndr
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46
votes
4 answers
ack misses results (vs. grep)
I'm sure I'm misunderstanding something about ack's file/directory ignore defaults, but perhaps somebody could shed some light on this for me:
mbuck$ grep logout -R app/views/
Binary file app/views/shared/._header.html.erb.bak.swp matches
Binary…
techpeace
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45
votes
2 answers
How to let ack support more filetypes?
in ack's home page, there lists a lot of file type, but without aspx, is it possible to let ack support it?
prime23
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39
votes
4 answers
Ack — Ignoring multiple directories without repeating the flag
Is it possible to ignore multiple directories in Ack, without repeating the flag?
e.g. I know the following works (i.e. setting multiple flags):
ack --ignore-dir=install --ignore-dir=php 'teststring'
I was hoping that I could separate directories…
SparrwHawk
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38
votes
1 answer
ack regex: Matching two words in order in the same line
I would like to find lines in files that include two words, word_1 and word_2 in order, such as in Line A below, but not as in Line B or Line C:
Line A: ... word_1 .... word_2 ....
Line B: ... word_1 ....
Line C: ... word_2 ....
I have tried
$ack…
Amelio Vazquez-Reina
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38
votes
4 answers
How can I get ack to ignore *.orig files?
I put this in my .ackrc:
--type-set=DUMB=*.orig
--noDUMB
... but I'm still seeing files like main.py.orig in my ack results. I tried doing --type-set=DUMB=*.*.orig too, but that didn't work either.
More info
Run from my command line (OSX Snow…
timmfin
- 2,025
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31
votes
3 answers
search for a specific file type with ack
How can I use ack to search in files of a specific file type.
For example
ack -f .scss blah
acl -f .rb blah
Obviously the above does not work but how can I do this with ack?
dagda1
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31
votes
6 answers
Search for files & file names using silver searcher
Using Silver Searcher, how can I search for:
(non-binary) files with a word or pattern AND
all filenames, with a word or pattern including filenames of binary files.
Other preferences: would like to have case insensitive search and search through…
Jikku Jose
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29
votes
5 answers
Can ack find files based on filename only?
Using ack (sometimes packaged as ack-grep) I know that I can find paths that contain a specific string by doing:
ack -g somestring
But what if I only want files which have "somestring" in their filenames?
Suan
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29
votes
3 answers
grep: repetition-operator operand invalid
I have this regular express (?<=heads\/)(.*?)(?=\n) and you can see it working here
http://regexr.com?347dm
I need this regex to work in the grep command but I'm getting this error.
$ grep -Eio '(?<=heads\/)(.*?)(?=\n)' text.txt
grep:…
jspooner
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