Getting ack to search through .htaccess or other dotfiles

Question

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

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

You can't do it in ack 1.x. ack 2.0 will have more flexible ways of specifying files.

Answer 3

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