Looking for a Needle in a Haystack! (or Using Ack to Improve Your Development Workflow)

This post originally appeared on the Quick Left Blog.

or Using Ack to Improve Your Development Workflow

Introduction

Every day when I’m programming, I invariably come to a point where I’m looking for a certain line of code in my project. Usually, there’s a pattern that I saw and want to reuse, and I can’t find it. I could just use my editor’s “find in files” feature and look for it, but sometimes I need more fine grained control. What if I want to find all the lines of code that don’t contain a certain phrase? What if I want to search on a Regular Expression? What if I want to easily save the search results to a file?

When I need more control in finding something, I turn my favorite command line search tool: ack.

Why Ack?

Why should you use ack, when your unix distribution comes with find, mdfind, and grep? Well, because it has these advantages:

• It only searches the stuff you care about. It excludes Git, Subversion, binary files, and other irrelevant file types.
• It can search all the files in a certain language, regardless of file extension.
• It is a lot easier to remember the command flags to scope your search than with other tools.

Installing Ack

To install Ack, I would suggest using homebrew. If you have it installed, just type brew install ack.

You can also use package on many other Unix distributions, as well as Macports, OpenBSD and FreeBSD, or just download it with this command:

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curl http://beyondgrep.com/ack-2.12-single-file > ~/bin/ack && chmod 0755 !#:3

Basic Seach

To do a basic search for a string in a file with ack, the syntax is as simple as:

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ack <search-pattern> <directory>

This will recursively search for the pattern in specified directory. I usually just use a simple text search. For example, if you were to do this:

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mkdir tmp && cd tmp
echo "Hello, world" > hello.txt
echo "Goodbye, world" > goodbye.txt
echo "Hello, squirrel" > hi.txt
echo "Goodbye, squirrel" > bye.txt

Then you could search for the files containing hello with:

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ack hello .

The . here means search the current directory. This is a recursive search by default. To turn off recursion, pass the -n flag, like this:

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mkdir child-directory
mv hello.txt child-directory
ack -n hello .

Now you’ll only see one result, hi.txt, because it’s the only file with ‘hello’ in it that lives in the current directory.

Sorting

Sometimes it would be nice to sort your search results. Easy enough!

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ack --sort-files -l

Inverse Search

One of my flags is -v, which lets you do a search for all the files that don’t match a given pattern. It comes in pretty handy.

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ack -v <search-pattern> <directory>

Careful, though, because that could be a lot of output. You might want to shovel it into a file like we did before, or at least pipe it to less.

Searching By File Type

One of my favoritate uses for ack is to searching for all the files in a certain language. Ack supports Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Shell, Clojure, HTML, and a bunch of other file types. To see a full listing, do:

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ack --help-types

If you want to, you can add new types, change the ones that are already there, or delete them, with --type-add, --type-set, and --type-del, respectively.

Assuming you’re good with the default types, let’s take it for a spin. Want a list of “all the things” Ruby? Open a Rails project and run this:

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ack -f --ruby > all-ruby-files.txt

Want to find all the Ruby files that call puts?

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ack --ruby puts .

Want to find all the files that say hello, but aren’t Ruby files?

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ack --type=noruby hello .

Using an .ackrc file

If you do a lot of acking, and you want to set up some ack options systemwide, or for your specific project, you can define an .ackrc file. To have ack generate one for you, run:

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ack --create-ackrc > .ackrc

Then, if you run a search in the current directory, the settings in the .ackrc will be used.

You can also put your ack options into an ACK_OPTIONS environment variable like so:

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export ACK_OPTIONS="--nocolor"

If you defined some ack options in an .ackrc or an environment variable and want to run a search without those options, you can also turn them off with:

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ack --noenv <search> <directory>

Advanced Searches

If you’re diggin’ it, here are some other fun things you can do with Ack.

Case Insenstivite Search

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ack -i <search-pattern> <directory>

Match Whole Words Only

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ack -w <search-pattern> <directory>

Only Output the Filenames, Without Highlighted Text

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ack -l <search-pattern> <directory>

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ack -L <search-pattern> <directory>

Just One Result (AKA “I’m Feeling Lucky”)

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ack -1 <search-pattern> <directory>

Vim Integration (AckVim)

If you’re a vim user, you might want to check out the AckVim Plugin. It lets you run ack inside of vim and see the results in a split window.

Once you’ve added it with Git or Vundle, it’s as easy as typing:

:Ack [options] {pattern} [{directories}]

It’s pretty nice to have around!

Ack the Cat, Cathy and Bar

Well, you’ve made it this far, so here’s some candy for you. Run these:

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ack --thpppt
ack --cathy
ack --bar

Goodbye!

Sometimes it can be like looking for a needle in a haystack trying to find what you need in your project.

Seriously, though, I hope this little tour of the small command line tool ack improves your programming experience. Cheers!