I'm sure I'm misunderstanding something about ack's file/directory ignore defaults, but perhaps somebody could shed some light on this for me:
mbuck$ grep logout -R app/views/
Binary file app/views/shared/._header.html.erb.bak.swp matches
Binary file app/views/shared/._header.html.erb.swp matches
app/views/shared/_header.html.erb.bak: <%= link_to logout_text, logout_path, { :title => logout_text, :class => 'login-menuitem' } %>
mbuck$ ack logout app/views/
mbuck$
Whereas...
mbuck$ ack -u logout app/views/
Binary file app/views/shared/._header.html.erb.bak.swp matches
Binary file app/views/shared/._header.html.erb.swp matches
app/views/shared/_header.html.erb.bak
98:<%= link_to logout_text, logout_path, { :title => logout_text, :class => 'login-menuitem' } %>
Simply calling ack
without options can't find the result within a .bak
file, but calling with the --unrestricted
option can find the result. As far as I can tell, though, ack does not ignore .bak
files by default.
UPDATE
Thanks to the helpful comments below, here are the new contents of my ~/.ackrc
:
--type-add=ruby=.haml,.rake --type-add=css=.less
ack
is peculiar in that it doesn't have a blacklist of file types to ignore, but rather a whitelist of file types that it will search in.
To quote from the man page:
With no file selections,
ack-grep
only searches files of types that it recognizes. If you have a file calledfoo.wango
, andack-grep
doesn't know what a .wango file is,ack-grep
won't search it.
(Note that I'm using Ubuntu where the binary is called ack-grep
due to a naming conflict)
ack --help-types
will show a list of types your ack installation supports.