How to show progress of ack-grep

Question

I use "ack-grep" to search for a specific content within a large number of files.

Because the search takes a very long time, I would like to see the status of the search. For example: It would be very useful, if ack-grep would print out the actual searching path, instead showing just a blank screen while the searching process is in progress.

Does anyone know, how to make ack-grep printing out status-information while searching is in progress?

Edit Here is the command I used until yet:

ack-grep StringToSearchFor --type=cc

ack-grep is a grep-like text finder. It is designed as a replacement for 99% of the uses of grep. — Lui, Feb 25 '15 at 09:10
Debian and its variants package ack as "ack-grep" because there was already a package called "ack". — Andy Lester, Feb 26 '15 at 04:19

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 26 '15 at 04:21

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Sorry, but ack does not have any sort of progress indicator.

It may make more sense for you to use grep for your searching, unless you are using any ack-specific features. Can you tell more about what it is that you're searching? Is it all source code?

answered Feb 26 '15 at 04:21

Andy Lester

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I added an example to my question above for you. I am searching for a string within source code and only source code. – Lui Feb 26 '15 at 07:18
I'm not seeing anything weird there, and using --cc means you're only searching the files you need to be, so I don't know if there's anything you could do to speed things up, other than use grep. – Andy Lester Feb 26 '15 at 15:12

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 25 '15 at 09:09

It is not what you are looking for, but maybe this helps

grep -H "you searched expression here" /your/path/here/*.php

It will grep in that dir (add -R if you need recursive) and you will see output as expression in found. Or you can redirect output to a log file, and tail -f logfile so that you can see current current status

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 23 '15 at 14:45

If speed is your problem, rather than showing progress using ack you might look at using an alternative, ag, also known as the the-silver-searcher.

ag is not 100% compatible with ack - "It started off as a clone of Ack, but their feature sets have since diverged slightly. In typical usage, Ag is 5-10x faster than Ack."

score 0 · Answer 4 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:13

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From https://serverfault.com/questions/343197/grep-progress-bar-using-pv-pipe-viewer/735274#735274

You can use the proc-filesystem on Linux systems, i.e.

ls -al /proc/<pid of grep>/fd

This lists all the files that the grep-process has open currently and thus provides information about where in the search it is currently.

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:13

Community

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answered Nov 10 '15 at 15:29

centic

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How to show progress of ack-grep

4 Answers4