<span style="background-color: #ffffff;">Some days back I posted an article on ack <a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/2009/08/24/more-powerful-grep-ack/" target="_blank">here. Today I was working on Solaris 9 and the default grep installed on the system does not have the &#8221;-r&#8221; option to search recursively. So, you know for all the time I had to keep using find with grep to work with directories recursively. This was something similar to the one below:

<span style="background-color: #ffffff;">find . -type f -exec grep amit {} \;

<span style="background-color: #ffffff;">or with useless use of cat command:

<span style="background-color: #ffffff;">find . -type f -exec cat{} \; | grep amit

<span style="background-color: #ffffff;">This is okay to make one or two searches but not that easy to keep typing and I already have too many aliase&#8217;s to have one more added to the list. So, I tried to use the ack command on the Solaris box, knowing full well that the command is written in perl and BINGO.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff;">There&#8217;s not much you need to do to get ack working on Solaris. Here&#8217;s what you need to do:

<span style="background-color: #ffffff;">Copy the ack command to one of the paths in the PATH.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff;">ack needs App/Ack.pm.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff;">Ack.pm needs File/Next.pm

<span style="background-color: #ffffff;">So, you copy these two files from any installation and then copy them to one of the paths mentioned in the output of &#8221;perl -V&#8221;. Done.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff;">Wasn&#8217;t that easy.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff;">

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