notes.jays.net

ack is awesome!

Originally posted to headrattle on 2010-03-04.

Wow! People have been telling me this for years, but I was getting along OK with my old school Unix craziness:

$ find ./ | grep -v svn | xargs grep '->Promotion'

But today I couldn't get that working. Something with xargs escaping of -> just refused to fly.

So I installed ack and ran it:

# cpan App::Ack $ ack '->Promotion'

And it found what I was looking for with zero fuss!

Control/SG.pm 335: $self->Promotion($promo_hash);

View/Web/Phoenix/lib/Phoenix/Controller/SG.pm 2844: $c->log->debug("you have these PromotionCode's already: " . (join ", ", keys %{$sg->Promotion})); 2846: unless ($sg->Promotion->{$preauth}) {

Holy buckets! That is AWESOME! Thanks Andy!

Comments

gregoa — March 4, 2010 at 6:26 PM

$ echo $GREP_OPTIONS
--exclude-dir=.svn
$ mkdir foo
$ echo '->Promotion' > foo/bar
$ cat foo/bar
->Promotion
$ grep -r "\>Promotion" .
foo/bar:->Promotion

Unknown — March 4, 2010 at 8:03 PM

grep -r is nice but you're still going to dig through a lot of files you dont need.
Ack has a really nice --perl option to filter for *.pl *.pm *.t, saving you some typing.

Brock — March 5, 2010 at 3:21 PM

You could do:

ack -- '->Promotion'

and thus skip the backslashes.