ack 3

ack is a code-searching tool, similar to grep but optimized for programmers searching large trees of source code. It is highly portable and runs on any platform that runs Perl.

ack is written and maintained by Andy Lester (andy@petdance.com).

• Project home page
• Code home page
• Issue tracker
• Mailing lists
  • ack-announce, announcements-only
  • ack-users, for users of ack
  • ack-dev, for ack development
• Build status
• CPAN Testers

Building

ack requires Perl 5.10.1 or higher, and it requires the File::Next module to be installed.

Checking prerequisites

To check ack's dependencies, run this command in the shell:

perl -MFile::Next -E'say "ack is ready to build!"'

If everything is OK, you'll see:

ack is ready to build!

If your installation of Perl is outdated, you'll see an error like this:

Unrecognized switch: -Esay "ack is ready to build!"  (-h will show valid options).

If you don't have File::Next installed, you'll see an error like this:

Can't locate File/Next.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /home/andy/...
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted.

and you'll need to install File::Next yourself:

# Install File::Next dependency
perl -MCPAN -e install File::Next

Building ack

If you've got a recent enough version of Perl and you have File::Next installed, you can build ack.

# Required
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
sudo make install # For a system-wide installation
# - or -
make ack-standalone
cp ack-standalone ~/bin/ack3 # For a personal installation

Development

• How to contribute
• Developer's Guide
• Design Guide

Community

See the Community page.

Please follow the Code of Conduct in all your interactions with our project.

License

Copyright 2005-2025 Andy Lester.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Artistic License v2.0. See also the LICENSE.md file that comes with the ack distribution.

Support

ack and beyondgrep.com are supported by DigitalOcean.