History file for ack.  https://beyondgrep.com/


2.999_02 Mon Jan  8 23:03:42 CST 2018
=====================================
[ENHANCEMENTS]
Added an optimization to make ack only do a line-by-line search of a
file if there's a match somewhere in the file.  This gives ack a 20-30%
in timings of common cases.


2.999_01 Mon Jan  1 22:11:17 CST 2018
=====================================
[ENHANCEMENTS]
Added --pod as a filetype, recognizing .pod as its extension.  This is
Perl's POD (Plain Old Documentation) format.

Added --markdown as a filetype, recognizing .md and .markdown as
extensions.

--pager is no longer allowed in a project .ackrc file.  --match and
--output are not allowed in any .ackrc file.

ack 3's new features are listed below for now.

[FIXES]
--lines had some mutex options that were not getting checked.  Now,
--lines is mutex with --passthru, --match and all context options.


=============================
# Release notes for ack 3.000
=============================

# New features

ack 3 is a greplike tool optimized for searching large code trees.

Improvements over ack 2 include:

* Improved `-w` option.

* `-w` option will warn if your pattern does not lend itself to
word matching.

* `-i`, `-I` and `--smart-case`

* `--proximate=N` option

* Added `--pod` and `--markdown`.

* Added `GNUmakefile` to the list of makefile specs.

* Added `-S` as a synonym for `--smart-case`.

# Bug fixes

* Column numbers were not getting colorized in the output.  Added
`--color-colno` option and `ACK_COLOR_COLNO` environment variable.

* A pattern that wanted whitespace at the end could match the
linefeed at the end of a line.  This is no longer possible.

# Incompatibilities with ack 2

## ack 3 requires Perl 5.10.1

ack 2 only needed Perl 5.8.8.  This shouldn't be a problem since 5.10.1
has been out since 2009.

## ack 3 no longer highlights capture groups.

ack 2 would highlight your capture groups.  For example,

    ack '(set|get)_foo_(name|id)'

would highlight the `set` or `get`, and the `name` or `id`, but not the
full `set_user_id` that was matched.

This feature was too confusing and has been removed.  Now, the entire
matching string is highlighted.

## ack 3's --output allows fewer special variables

In ack 2, you could put any kind of Perl code in the `--output`
option and it would get `eval`uated at run time, which would let
you do tricky stuff like this gem from Mark Fowler
(http://www.perladvent.org/2014/2014-12-21.html):

    ack --output='$&: @{[ eval "use LWP::Simple; 1" && length LWP::Simple::get($&) ]} bytes' \
                    'https?://\S+' list.txt
    http://google.com/: 19529 bytes
    http://metacpan.org/: 7560 bytes
    http://www.perladvent.org/: 5562 bytes

This has been a security problem in the past, and so in ack 3 we
no longer `eval` the contents of `--output`.  You're now restricted
to the following variables: `$1` thru `$9`, `$_`, `$.`, `$&`, ``$` ``,
`$'` and `$+`.  You can also embed `\t`, `\n` and `\r` ,
and `$f` as stand-in for `$filename` in `ack2 --output` .