Chicago.PM - Beyond grep - Expanding the Programmer Toolset

Last week, Andy Lester (author of Land the Tech Job You Love) came to talk about tools to help programmers work more efficiently and the 2.0 release of his Ack search tool.

If you haven't tried Ack, but you use long, complicated Grep lines every day, you're missing out on a great, time-saving tool. Installing ack is easy on many platforms (including Windows!).

For those who have added Ack to their regular arsenal, the 2.0 release brings some minor breaking changes (removing the -a option for "search all files" and changing the default file type filter to "all text files") designed to make Ack more Do-What-I-Mean and more compatible with Grep (when it makes sense, ack is made for humans). The result being that using Ack should not take you out of The Zone by requiring you to check the manual every time (something I must confess to doing often with Grep and Find).

I must also confess to using only the most basic Ack command-line options, but Andy explored a lot of functionality I was not aware of, both in Ack and Grep:

# Search for full words
ack -w
grep -w

# List the files that matched instead of the matching line
ack -l
grep -l

# Invert the match ("does not match X")
ack -v
grep -v

# Override the default output with capture groups
ack 'use (\S+);' --output='$1' -h | sort -u

# Search the file path for matches (Beyond Find)
ack -f
ack -g

# Accept a list of files to search on STDIN (Built-in Xargs)
ack -x

The last two features are great for chaining together Ack commands:

# Find all perl files not in the 'release' repository
ack -g -v 'release' --perl |

# ... search them for the word '2.46.3207.2'
ack -x '2.46.3207.2' -w -l | 

# ... and if they match, edit them with sed
xargs sed -i 's/2.46.3207.2/2.49.3333.12/'

# This little snippet saved me some hours of manual work upgrading version numbers

There was also a lot of discussion on other tools to help programmers be more efficient. The ones I was most interested in were ctags, which I don't use nearly enough (I use ack instead), and cscope, which I had never heard about.

The problem with adding new things to your toolkit is integrating them into your flow (the flow that can be consciously experienced is not the true flow). Whenever you add a new thing, especially if it replaces an existing thing, you're losing efficiency in the short-term in order to add potential efficiency in the long-term. Despite this, a lot of things are worth it, Ack more-so than most.

Sometimes you don't know you're doing something inefficiently until someone comes along and tells you so, or shows you a solution to a problem you never knew you were having. Ack is a solution to a grep problem: Grep is harder to use in the most-common cases. That said, Grep still has its uses, just uncommon ones.

A big thanks to Andy for giving a presentation on such short notice! Our next meeting is on May 23, so check out the Chicago.pm website and join us!