4 ms·

I'm not trying to start a theological war about grep/ack here, I'm just mentioning it in case someone hasn't heard about 'ack' before and they (like me) might f

I'm not trying to start a theological war about grep/ack here, I'm just mentioning it in case someone hasn't heard about 'ack' before and they (like me) might find it extremely useful: http://betterthangrep.com http://betterthangrep.com It's grep, just better. It highlights the selected text, it shows which files, and in what line the text was found (and uses vivid colors so you can distinguish them easily), ignores .git and .hg directories (among others, that shouldn't be searched) by default, you can tell it to search, for example for only `--cpp` or `--objc` or `--ruby` or `--text` files (with a flag, not a filename pattern), and many many other neat features that I'm sure grep has, but you have to remember and memorize them. ack has sensible defaults. Why ack? http://betterthangrep.com/why-ack/ http://betterthangrep.com/why-ack/ manpage: http://betterthangrep.com/documentation/ http://betterthangrep.com/documentation/ Oh, and ack is written in perl and doesn't require admin privileges to install.

Mordor 14y ago
Not trying to start a war here either, but is it faster?
- pooriaazimi 14y ago
  It's faster than BSD grep, but (in my experience) slightly slower than GNU grep. The productivity boost though, is enormous.
ComputerGuru 14y ago
Do you know of any C ports of ack? Ack is beautiful and productive, but nowhere near as fast as grep (orders of magnitude slower, in fact). gfind . -type f -exec grep -i mbr {} \; >| /dev/null 1.10s user 0.81s system 90% cpu 2.113 total gfind . -type f -exec ack -i mbr {} \; >| /dev/null 24.34s user 4.17s system 96% cpu 29.678 total (Yes, I know about the flag to search recursively. This is the most fair comparison.)
- pooriaazimi 14y ago
  I'm not on a machine that I can use freely to test, but maybe you shouldn't use -exec? use xargs instead. I don't remember it being slower than grep that much...
- AngryParsley 14y ago
  I wrote a mostly-clone of Ack in C: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher . Output format and most flags are the same. Besides the speed, most users won't notice a difference. I spared no effort in optimizing. Pthreads, mmap(), boyer-moore-horspool strstr, it's all there. Searching my ~/code (5.2GB of stuff), I get this: ag blahblahblah 1.93s user 3.54s system 313% cpu 1.749 total ack blahblahblah 9.75s user 2.79s system 98% cpu 12.690 total Both programs ignore a lot of extraneous files by default (hidden files, binary files, stuff in .gitignore, etc). The real amount of data searched is closer to 500MB.
  - zurn 14y ago
    Did you benchmark read() vs mmap()? Most tools seem to go with read() for grep-like io patterns. In fact looks like GNU grep has --mmap switch and it's a little bit faster in the simple case than default on my Ubuntu system. But -i makes mmap slower. Maybe GNU grep just avoids mmap because of error handling (you get a segfault/bus error instead of an io error return when things go wrong).
  - kamaal 14y ago
    Only that, Ack's core strength over time will always evolve and depend on Perl's regular expression and text processing powers. So re writing this in C will fundamentally mean endlessly growing a language which will look similar to the Perl implementation. Or a Perl DSL. Not that its a bad thing, I find it interesting though. I would say you better start with a specification.
    - AngryParsley 14y ago
      Ag supports the same regexes as Ack. I use the PCRE library. I only call pcre_study once, and I use the new PCRE-JIT[1] on systems where it's available. These tweaks add up to a 3-5x speedup over Ack when regex-matching. 1. http://sljit.sourceforge.net/pcre.html http://sljit.sourceforge.net/pcre.html
dchest 14y ago
Now, if we need something 3x-5x faster than Ack... https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- JonnieCache 14y ago
  This comes highly recommended.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
pixelbeat 14y ago
For a similar but much faster tool than ack, which simply wraps `find` and `grep` in the UNIX tradition, see: http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/findrepo http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/findrepo
ZeroGravitas 14y ago
You can tweak some git grep config settings and get the ack UI and because it's git grep it's got most of the code conveniences too as well as the speed. http://travisjeffery.com/b/2012/02/search-a-git-repo-like-a-ninja/ http://travisjeffery.com/b/2012/02/search-a-git-repo-like-a-...
- travisjeffery 14y ago
  Hey! Glad you found my post useful!
  - scrumper 14y ago
    So did I. It's excellent.
caioariede 14y ago
For myself I usually use this function below that is useful if you do a lot of code grep. function g! { grep -nr --exclude=.git --exclude=.hg --exclude=.svn --include="*.$1" "$2" ${3-"."} --colour; } And then: g! py "some python code" https://coderwall.com/p/uhzc0a https://coderwall.com/p/uhzc0a
chimeracoder 14y ago
> doesn't require admin privileges to install. To be fair, neither does GNU Grep - just do `make' (without `make install') and you're good to go.
wting 14y ago
> It highlights the selected text, grep --color > it shows which files, and in what line the text was found (and uses vivid colors so you can distinguish them easily), grep -rn --color pattern ./files/ files/foo.sh:123: echo "Look at the floral pattern on this dress!" > ignores .git and .hg directories (among others, that shouldn't be searched) by default, git --exclude=.git --exclude=.hg --exclude=.svn > you can tell it to search, for example for only `--cpp` or `--objc` or `--ruby` or `--text` files (with a flag, not a filename pattern), You would use `find` in conjunction with `grep`. "Art of Unix Programming", modularity, and all that jazz. Presumably you would just modify your own grep alias or define a function to avoid retyping. The end result pretty much looks like my grep alias: alias grep='grep -Ein --color --exclude=.git --exclude=.hg --exclude=.svn' I still fail to see a reason to use ack, especially when I can assume grep is always available for portability.
- jpatokal 14y ago
  ...and many many other neat features that I'm sure grep has, but you have to remember and memorize them. ack has sensible defaults. That's why.

Mordor 14y ago

Not trying to start a war here either, but is it faster?

pooriaazimi 14y ago
It's faster than BSD grep, but (in my experience) slightly slower than GNU grep. The productivity boost though, is enormous.

ComputerGuru 14y ago

Do you know of any C ports of ack? Ack is beautiful and productive, but nowhere near as fast as grep (orders of magnitude slower, in fact). gfind . -type f -exec grep -i mbr {} \; >| /dev/null 1.10s user 0.81s system 90% cpu 2.113 total gfind . -type f -exec ack -i mbr {} \; >| /dev/null 24.34s user 4.17s system 96% cpu 29.678 total (Yes, I know about the flag to search recursively. This is the most fair comparison.)

pooriaazimi 14y ago
I'm not on a machine that I can use freely to test, but maybe you shouldn't use -exec? use xargs instead. I don't remember it being slower than grep that much...
AngryParsley 14y ago
I wrote a mostly-clone of Ack in C: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher . Output format and most flags are the same. Besides the speed, most users won't notice a difference. I spared no effort in optimizing. Pthreads, mmap(), boyer-moore-horspool strstr, it's all there. Searching my ~/code (5.2GB of stuff), I get this: ag blahblahblah 1.93s user 3.54s system 313% cpu 1.749 total ack blahblahblah 9.75s user 2.79s system 98% cpu 12.690 total Both programs ignore a lot of extraneous files by default (hidden files, binary files, stuff in .gitignore, etc). The real amount of data searched is closer to 500MB.
- zurn 14y ago
  Did you benchmark read() vs mmap()? Most tools seem to go with read() for grep-like io patterns. In fact looks like GNU grep has --mmap switch and it's a little bit faster in the simple case than default on my Ubuntu system. But -i makes mmap slower. Maybe GNU grep just avoids mmap because of error handling (you get a segfault/bus error instead of an io error return when things go wrong).
- kamaal 14y ago
  Only that, Ack's core strength over time will always evolve and depend on Perl's regular expression and text processing powers. So re writing this in C will fundamentally mean endlessly growing a language which will look similar to the Perl implementation. Or a Perl DSL. Not that its a bad thing, I find it interesting though. I would say you better start with a specification.
  - AngryParsley 14y ago
    Ag supports the same regexes as Ack. I use the PCRE library. I only call pcre_study once, and I use the new PCRE-JIT[1] on systems where it's available. These tweaks add up to a 3-5x speedup over Ack when regex-matching. 1. http://sljit.sourceforge.net/pcre.html http://sljit.sourceforge.net/pcre.html

dchest 14y ago

Now, if we need something 3x-5x faster than Ack... https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
JonnieCache 14y ago
This comes highly recommended.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

pixelbeat 14y ago

For a similar but much faster tool than ack, which simply wraps `find` and `grep` in the UNIX tradition, see: http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/findrepo http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/findrepo

ZeroGravitas 14y ago

You can tweak some git grep config settings and get the ack UI and because it's git grep it's got most of the code conveniences too as well as the speed. http://travisjeffery.com/b/2012/02/search-a-git-repo-like-a-ninja/ http://travisjeffery.com/b/2012/02/search-a-git-repo-like-a-...

travisjeffery 14y ago
Hey! Glad you found my post useful!
- scrumper 14y ago
  So did I. It's excellent.

caioariede 14y ago

For myself I usually use this function below that is useful if you do a lot of code grep. function g! { grep -nr --exclude=.git --exclude=.hg --exclude=.svn --include="*.$1" "$2" ${3-"."} --colour; } And then: g! py "some python code" https://coderwall.com/p/uhzc0a https://coderwall.com/p/uhzc0a

chimeracoder 14y ago

> doesn't require admin privileges to install. To be fair, neither does GNU Grep - just do `make' (without `make install') and you're good to go.

wting 14y ago

> It highlights the selected text, grep --color > it shows which files, and in what line the text was found (and uses vivid colors so you can distinguish them easily), grep -rn --color pattern ./files/ files/foo.sh:123: echo "Look at the floral pattern on this dress!" > ignores .git and .hg directories (among others, that shouldn't be searched) by default, git --exclude=.git --exclude=.hg --exclude=.svn > you can tell it to search, for example for only `--cpp` or `--objc` or `--ruby` or `--text` files (with a flag, not a filename pattern), You would use `find` in conjunction with `grep`. "Art of Unix Programming", modularity, and all that jazz. Presumably you would just modify your own grep alias or define a function to avoid retyping. The end result pretty much looks like my grep alias: alias grep='grep -Ein --color --exclude=.git --exclude=.hg --exclude=.svn' I still fail to see a reason to use ack, especially when I can assume grep is always available for portability.

jpatokal 14y ago
...and many many other neat features that I'm sure grep has, but you have to remember and memorize them. ack has sensible defaults. That's why.