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Is there any way to get ack to search through a file whose filename starts with a . (e.g. .htaccess), without resorting to the --all or --unrestricted options?

I've tried adding the following to my ~/.ackrc file to no avail:

--type-set=apache=.htaccess
Andrew
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3 Answers3

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It would appear that ack doesn't recognize a filename that's all extension; that is, when you specify an extension of ".htaccess", ack only looks for files with at least one character before that extension.

To get around this, you can use -u/--unrestricted in combination with the -G regex flag (to restrict the search to files whose names match a regex). For example:

$ ack -u -G '\.htaccess' pattern
Sean
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  • To configure in `.ackrc`, place `-u` and `-G/\.(bash_aliases|bash_history|bashrc)$` (for example) on *separate lines*. The missing space after `-G` is significant. The advantage is that you don't need to add these parameters and it doesn't search through `.orig` files and the like. The downside is of course when you *don't* want to use the `-u` option. – l0b0 Mar 06 '12 at 15:15
  • Note: this doesn't seem to work with ack 2 - `ack -u -G '\.htaccess' pattern # Option '-u' is not valid in ack 2`, and without the -u it says -G is not a valid option either – alexanderbird Feb 01 '16 at 06:12
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Updated @Sean's answer for Ack 2

since they removed the two flags that @Sean used

ack 2 release notes say:

The -G option has been removed. Two patterns on the command line was ambiguous. In this command line:

ack1 -G filepattern -i -w searchpattern

which pattern does -i and -w modify? Now, with ack 2.0, you can use the new -x to pipe filenames from one invocation of ack into another.

ack2 -g -i filepattern | ack2 -x -w searchpattern

and the -u (unrestricted) flag is not needed any more. So what you want is: 

ack -g "\.htaccess" | ack -x pattern

Or, for that matter, just use find to generate the file list (especially useful to find a file in a dotfolder):

find **/.hidden/complex-path/* | ack -x pattern
alexanderbird
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You can't do it in ack 1.x. ack 2.0 will have more flexible ways of specifying files.

Andy Lester
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