I’m gonna take a little departure from our regularly scheduled graphics content and introduce all of you (at least all of you who don’t already know) to a tool called “ack”. Affectionally calling itself “a tool like grep, optimized for programmers”, that’s exactly what it is.
It’s capable of searching text files with incredible speed, searching my entire OpenSceneGraph tree for occurances of “glBegin” in about 4 seconds (from the screenshot above). It’s also smart enough to know to avoid VCS directories, eliminating the constant frustration of finding stuff buried in your .svn and .git folders. Written entirely in perl, it’s available as a module for linux & Mac (port), or as a single script you can download and use.
Check it out at the link below.
Beyond grep: ack 2.04, a source code search tool for programmers.
