Creating and using ackrc

2022-04-02 1 min read Learning ack grep Fedora

ack is a fantastic replacement for grep and probably much more than grep. Here is what the dnf info has to say about ack

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Name         : ack
Architecture : noarch
Summary      : Grep-like text finder
URL          : http://beyondgrep.com/
License      : Artistic 2.0
Description  : Ack is designed as a replacement for grep.

And their websites says -

Designed for programmers with large heterogeneous trees of source code, ack is written in portable Perl 5 and takes advantage of the power of Perl’s regular expressions.

And I completely agree with that. There are really a lot of developer friendly options that ack has. As with any other unix/linux utility you can create a rc file for the defaults of the program and with ack you dont need to do that manually. You can simply run

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ack -i --create-ackrc >~/.ackrc

and you will have a ackrc file in your home folder. Now you can open this and modify this to your heart’s content and enjoy the new grep of your life.

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