[Israel.pm] On ack and GNU grep

[Mikhael Goikhman]

On 20 Aug 2007 10:40:47 +0300, Yuval Kogman wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Aug 20, 2007 at 07:22:30 +0000, Mikhael Goikhman wrote:
> > But it is written in pure perl, so it should be quite slower then grep.
> 
> The point of ack is not in the 'grep' bit but in the -r bit.
> 
> Think of it as grep -r with find(1) options and a set of default
> rules for programming languages.
> 
> So while it probably won't go through files faster than grep,
> chances are it'll provide the results you want faster in most cases
> that it is the right tool.

I try to come with good use cases where it's a more right tool than grep
and I can't. GNU grep does colors too, and multiple --exclude '*.rb',
and even extra features like context lines.

Unfortunately ack is much slower then grep (about 9 times), and yes, I
speak about "grep -r --exclude" or "grep -P PERL_REGEXP long file list".

Regards,
Mikhael.

-- 
perl -e 'print+chr(64+hex)for+split//,d9b815c07f9b8d1e'