Better Than Grep

I’m not that knowledgable about the command line and controlling a server with it. Over the years I have picked up a few bits – I use nano a lot for editing files, and I like to use grep to search my code.

Or at least I used to.

Ack

The other day I was trying to work out how something worked in WordPress, and I was using grep to search the WordPress code base – except it wasn’t traversing the directory tree properly. So I asked on Twitter if I was doing something wrong. I got this as a reply…

@BinaryMoon Have you tried http://t.co/9N6BiIbE ?

— Simon Prosser (@prossorguk) January 30, 2013

So I checked out BetterThanGrep.com a quick read and it looked like what I need. Ack is a replacement for grep designed specifically for programmers.

Installing it was easy – just a single line of code to grab a Perl script from an external website (obviously caution is recommended when doing this sort of thing).

curl http://betterthangrep.com/ack-standalone > ~/bin/ack && chmod 0755 !#:3

How To Use Ack

Using ack is super simple. All you have to do is navigate to the directory you want to search and then type ack 'search_term'.

To go with this there are a bunch of additional parameters that allow you to display and filter the results in the way that works best for you. For me I have only used a few of the parameters so far – I’ve listed them below. You can read the rest of the commands in the documentation.

Display lines either side of result

ack -A 5 -B 5 'search_query'

The A and B options display the matched line of code, and the lines before and after – with the number of them limited by the size added after the option. In the example above I limited it to 5 lines either side of the result.

Display files only and not results

ack -l 'search_query'

The l option changes the output so that it only displays the filenames of the files that were found to have the search query. I used this to narrow down my search so that I could work out what directory my problem files were in.