Creator of ack here. The three biggest reasons to use grepalikes is not necessarily the time to execute the search, but 1) The reduced amount of typing. It's

Creator of ack here. The three biggest reasons to use grepalikes is not necessarily the time to execute the search, but 1) The reduced amount of typing. It's much faster to type "ack foo --ruby" than it is to type "find . -name '* .rb' | xargs grep foo" 2) Better filetype matching, because ack and ag check things beyond just file extensions. ack's --ruby flag checks for *.rb and Rakefile and "ruby" appearing in the shebang line, for example. 3) More features that grep doesn't include, like better highlighting and grouping, or full Perl regular expressions (in ack) and a ton of other features. Here's a command line to find all the header files in your C source. It takes advantage of the ability to use Perl's regular expressions to specify output: ack --cc '#include <(.+?)>' -H --output='$1' | sort -u Here's an article I wrote a while ago on comparing the features of ack and ag. https://blog.newrelic.com/2015/01/28/grep-ack-ag/ https://blog.newrelic.com/2015/01/28/grep-ack-ag/ Even though I created ack, I don't care which tool you use, so long as it suits your needs and makes you happy, but if all you're using your grep/ack/ag for is "grep -R function_name ." then you're only scratching the surface of what the tools can do for you.