Beyond grep, Ack: a better grep, for programmers

I use something like this which i wrote myself years ago, but i still use it every day. My version is called qgrep (for quick grep).

It does this:

* knows which files are source code and which are not * ignores tmp files like ~ and # * automatic recursive search.

Some differences from ACK which i still want,

* can be given a filename pattern and can glob within each directory. * can search binary files too! * doesn't do regexp at all!

> why? regexp is much slower than straight string search if using something like Boyer-Moore-Galil, and this is important when you're searching massive subtrees of files.

For regexp, I'll use grep with its fancy options. For straight, find this string in all my code, I'll use qgrep.

For those linker undefined, mangled functions, it's great to qgrep the .o files and .libs.

I must be getting old. I dread the idea of learning a new, complex command-line option set.