---
category: app
title: Ack
layout: post
---

*"Ack is designed as a replacement for 99% of the uses of grep."*

"Ack":http://search.cpan.org/~petdance/ack-1.84/ack is a real nice tool for searching your source code. It's faster than grep because he already knows what you want : searching sources files :)

By default it will not search in SCM files (.svn, .cvs, ...), backups files (source.pl~, source.pl.bak, ...). You can specify what kind of files you want (--perl --cc, ...), make it match some regex with --match, ...

And you can set some defaults configuration in a .ackrc file ! Mine looks like this:

bc. --sort-files
--color
--context=1
--follow


p. Check also: "vim with ack integration":http://use.perl.org/~Ovid/journal/36430?from=rss.

Oh, and it's the only program with --thpppt option.
