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Is anyone else turned off by the tone of the blog post and the attitude of the poster? There's gotta be a better way to showcase the usefulness of a tool.



I'm more turned off by hard-to-read regular expressions, especially ones that look like they may break depending on what terminal emulator I'm using, how quotes are escaped, etc. The "you've been doing it wrong for years" tone I could do without, but see people using it with good enough intentions so frequently that I'm no longer bothered by it.

Also, `ack` is not installed by default, which is reason enough to not get too used to it. Some people will say "optimize for being on your own machine, since you are 99% of the time", but I'm not. Installing additional utilities on multiple production servers is annoying enough, and can actually become problematic in a PCI-compliant environment as mine is. I'm also frequently helping out other members of my team, and having a magic one-liner that often results in "-bash: ack: command not found" is not terribly useful to me. YMMV.




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