ack icon
ack icon

ack

 10 likes

Ack is designed as a standalone (one perl file) replacement for 99% of the uses of grep. ack is intelligent about the files it searches. It knows about certain file types, based on both the extension on the file and, in some cases, the contents of the file.

ack screenshot 1

License model

  • FreeOpen Source

Application type

Country of Origin

  • US flagUnited States

Platforms

  • Mac
  • Linux
5 / 5 Avg rating (1)
10likes
2comments
0news articles

Features

Suggest and vote on features
  1.  Full-Text Search
  2.  Support for regular expressions
  3.  File Search
  4.  Search and Replace

 Tags

  • text-search
  • search-tool
  • grep
  • text-utility
  • search-text-in-files

ack News & Activities

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ack information

  • Developed by

    US flagAndy Lester
  • Licensing

    Open Source and Free product.
  • Alternatives

    16 alternatives listed
  • Supported Languages

    • English

AlternativeTo Category

File Management

Our users have written 2 comments and reviews about ack, and it has gotten 10 likes

ack was added to AlternativeTo by kafene on Sep 26, 2012 and this page was last updated Sep 9, 2022.

Comments and Reviews

   
 Post comment/review
Top Positive Comment
dadoomer
Jul 18, 2019
0

Easy to use, text searching tool! Displays the file and lines where the text was found. Searchs recursively on the folder it was run on.

petdance
Aug 29, 2013
0

Please note that ack is written purely in Perl, and thus uses Perl regular expressions. PCRE is supposedly "Perl-compatible regular expressions" but there are incompatibilities.

What is ack?

Ack is designed as a standalone (one perl file) replacement for 99% of the uses of grep. ack is intelligent about the files it searches. It knows about certain file types, based on both the extension on the file and, in some cases, the contents of the file.

Ack ignores backup files and files under CVS and .svn directories. It also highlights matches to help you see where the match was. Ack uses perl regular expressions (PCRE).

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

Official Links