How to install:

Top reasons to use ack instead of grep.

• It's blazingly fast because it only searches the stuff you want searched.
• ack is pure Perl, so it runs on Windows just fine.
• The standalone version uses no non-standard modules, so you can put it in your ~/bin without fear.
• Searches recursively through directories by default, while ignoring .svn, CVS and other VCS directories.
  • Which would you rather type?
  • $ grep pattern $(find . -type f | grep -v '\.svn')
  • $ ack pattern
• ack ignores most of the crap you don't want to search
  
  • VCS directories
  • blib, the Perl build directory
  • backup files like foo~ and #foo#
  • binary files, core dumps, etc
• Ignoring .svn directories means that ack is faster than grep for searching through trees
• Lets you specify file types to search, as in --perl or --nohtml
  
  • Which would you rather type?
  • $ grep pattern $(find . -name '*.pl' -or -name '*.pm' -or -name '*.pod' | grep -v .svn)
  • $ ack --perl pattern
  • Note that ack's --perl also checks the shebang lines of files without suffixes, which the find command will not
• File-filtering capabilities usable without searching with ack -f. This lets you create lists of files of a given type
  
  • $ ack -f --perl > all-perl-files
• Color highlighting of search results