The Silver Searcher

The ack utility was designed to replace 99% of the uses of grep.

As stated in the man page

Ack searches the named input FILEs (or standard input if no files are named, or the file name - is given) for lines containing a match to the given PATTERN . By default, ack prints the matching lines. Ack can also list files that would be searched, without actually searching them, to let you take advantage of ack's file-type filtering capabilities.

Silver Searcher ag is similar to ack with a focus on spead. Without ack ag would not exist.

Installing

macOS

brew install the_silver_searcher

or

port install the_silver_searcher

Linux

• Ubuntu >= 13.10 (Saucy) or Debian >= 8 (Jessie)

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    apt-get install silversearcher-ag

• Fedora 21 and lower

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    yum install the_silver_searcher

• Fedora 22+

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    dnf install the_silver_searcher

• RHEL7+

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    yum install epel-release.noarch the_silver_searcher

• Gentoo

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    emerge -a sys-apps/the_silver_searcher

• Arch

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    pacman -S the_silver_searcher

• Slackware

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    sbopkg -i the_silver_searcher

• openSUSE:

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    zypper install the_silver_searcher

• CentOS:

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    yum install the_silver_searcher

• SUSE Linux Enterprise: Follow these simple instructions.

BSD

• FreeBSD

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    pkg install the_silver_searcher

• OpenBSD/NetBSD

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    pkg_add the_silver_searcher

Windows

• Win32/64

  Unofficial daily builds are available.

• Chocolatey

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    choco install ag

• MSYS2

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    pacman -S mingw-w64-{i686,x86_64}-ag

• Cygwin

  Run the relevant setup-*.exe, and select "the_silver_searcher" in the "Utils" category.