update

As Andy Lester told me ack is a simple file you only have to copy in your ~/bin folder. Now I’ve got ack on my professional server.

Go on http://betterthangrep.com to download it.

Sincerely, I don’t understand ack don’t become a common command on all UNIX systems. I can no more live without. For me it is as essential as which or find.

Better than grep

One of the my main usage of grep is

grep 'pattern' **/*(.)

Most of time it is enough. But it is far better with colored output. ack-grep in Ubuntu does that. As I couldn’t install it on my ‘Evil Company Server’, I had done one myself in very few lines:

#!/usr/bin/env zsh
(($#<1)) && { print 'usage: ack "regexp"' >&2; exit 1 }

listeFic=( **/*(.) )
autoload zargs
zargs -- $listeFic -- grep $1 | perl -ne 'use Term::ANSIColor;
if (m/([^:]*)(:.*)('$1')(.*)/) {
    print color("green").$1;
    print color("reset").$2;
    print color("black","on_yellow").$3;
    print color("reset").$4."\n";
} '

For my team and I it is usable enough. I hope it could help.