Grep vs Ack and weird Homebrew policy

gmarik 2 min

Using Ack was frustrating experience recently. Ack had troubles finding things.

$ time ack -Ri 'cancel the remaining quantity of this line item' ./app

real	0m0.730s
user	0m0.220s
sys	0m0.137s

$ time grep -Ri 'cancel the remaining quantity of this line item' ./app
./app/views/order_line_items/_cancel_form.html.haml:  Cancel the remaining quantity of this line item:

real	0m13.791s
user	0m0.282s
sys	0m0.321s

$ time git grep -i 'cancel the remaining quantity of this line item' ./app|cat
app/views/order_line_items/_cancel_form.html.haml:  Cancel the remaining quantity of this line item:

real	0m1.188s
user	0m1.984s
sys	0m0.074s

As you can see Ack found nothing in 0.7 sec. Grep spent 13.8 sec yelding results first time. git-grep was the fastest to get results.

Some time ago people just switched to Ack. I did that too and did that for a reason. Biggest problem I had with grep - inability to configure exclustion patterns for directories. Apparently not anymore. With grep-2.6 it’s possible to configure excludes with --exclude-dir option.

But you’re in trouble if you’re OSX user: latest grep OSX got is version 2.5.1

$ /usr/bin/grep --version
grep (GNU grep) 2.5.1

Homebrew to the rescue! Well, not quite true: homebrew doesn’t ship system duplicates

Why would they decide not to have grep???

Anyway back to grep. Along with compiling it from source there’s still a way to get it installed with homebrew: just use homebrew-alt fork:

$ brew install https://raw.github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-dupes/master/grep.rb

UPDATE: branch moved to new repo named ‘homebrew-alt’ UPDATE2: now there’s official homebrew-dupes repo

I’m back to using grep and git-grep.

!

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