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Not arguing with your basic point, which is good, but when the developer says "The binary name is 33% shorter than ack!", he's referring to the difference betwe
by mturmon 15y ago
Not arguing with your basic point, which is good, but when the developer says "The binary name is 33% shorter than ack!", he's referring to the difference between typing "ag" vs. typing "ack". Not the size in bytes of the executable.
It's a little inside joke, because one of the points in favor of "ack", offered jokingly years ago by its developer, is that "ack" is 25% fewer letters to type compared to "grep".
(This feature is still there as point #10 in http://betterthangrep.com/why-ack/ http://betterthangrep.com/why-ack/, now not offered 100% jokingly.)
- petdance 15y agoIt's a joke but not. The less typing you have to do, the better. Less typing means fewer mistakes and less time waiting for the search to start. Defaults matter. ack is all about having sensible defaults for your most common uses.