Install & Configure ack on Mac

Posted:

ack! I think I just pooped myself.

ack is way sweeter than grep. It's much faster and easier to use.

Install

Simply download the standalone version of ack to your path, and make the file executable:

sudo curl http://betterthangrep.com/ack-standalone > /usr/local/bin/ack && chmod 0755 !#:3

Usage

Now, in Terminal, you can run ack 'hello world' (instead of grep -r 'hello world' .) to search all files for hello world.

Configure

As a good starting point, simply download r00k's .ackrc file:

curl https://github.com/r00k/dotfiles/raw/master/ackrc > ~/.ackrc