Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Search your sourcecode better with ack..!

One of my good friends told me about a new tool that I could use to search for strings in my source code.

It is called ack and it is pretty easy to install and use.

I have a RHEL 5.5 system and it works without a lot of hassle.

Below is the URL for it.

http://betterthangrep.com/install/

The URL for the actual tool is
http://betterthangrep.com/

As the name suggests, this is a better than grep and I second it.

So who is this useful for?

I would say developers who use search more often to look for certain specific strings in their source code would really love this tool.

Advantages:

  • It's fast because it only searches the stuff it makes sense to search.
  • Searches entire trees by default while ignoring Subversion, Git and other VCS directories and other files that aren't your source code.
  • Where grep is a general text search tool, ack is especially for the programmer searching source code. Common tasks take fewer keystrokes.
  • Ack costs nothing. It's 100% free.

No comments: