ack 2.0 is a text searching utility optimized for searching trees of source code.

# Incompatibilities with ack 1.x

ack 2 makes some big changes in its behaviors that could trip up
users who are used to the idiosyncracies of ack 1.x.  These changes
could affect your searching happiness, so please read them.

* ack's default behavior is now to search all files that it identifies
as being text.  ack 1.x would only search files that were of a file
type that it recognized.

* Removed the `-a` and `-u` options since the default is to search
all text files.

* Removed the `--binary` option.  ack 2.0 will not find and search
through binary files.

* Removed the `--skipped` option.

* Removed the `--invert-file-match` option.  `-v` now works with
`-g`.  To list files that do not match `/foo/`

    ack -g foo -v

* `-g` now obeys all regex options: `-i`, `-w`, `-Q`, `-v`

* Removed the `-G` switch, because it was too confusing to have two
regexes specified on the command line.  Now you use the `-x` switch
to pipe filenames from one `ack` invocation into another.

To search files with filename matching "sales" for the string "foo":

    ack -g sales | ack -x foo

# New features in ack 2.0

ack 2.0 will:

* by default search all text files, as identified by Perl's `-T` operator
    * We will no longer have a `-a` switch.

* improved flexibility in defining filetype selectors
    * name equality ($filename eq 'Makefile')
    * glob-style matching (`*.pl` identifies a Perl file)
    * regex-style matching (`/\.pl$/i` identifies a Perl file)
    * shebang-line matching (shebang line matching `/usr/bin/perl/` identifies a Perl file)

* support for multiple ackrc files
    * global ackrc (/etc/ackrc)
        * https://github.com/petdance/ack/issues/#issue/79
    * user-specific ackrc (~/.ackrc)
    * per-project ackrc files (~/myproject/.ackrc)

* you can use --dump to figure which options are set where

* all inclusion/exclusion rules will be in the ackrc files
    * ack 2.0 has a set of definitions for filetypes, directories to
      include or exclude, etc, *but* these are only included so you don't
      need to ship an ackrc file to a new machine.  You may tell ack to
      disregard these defaults if you like.

* In addition to the classic `--thpppt` option to draw Bill the
Cat, `ack --bar` will draw (of course) Admiral Ackbar.

# Building

    # Required
    perl Makefile.PL
    make
    make test
    sudo make install # for a system-wide installation (recommended)
    # - or -
    make ack-standalone
    cp ack-standalone ~/bin/ack2 # for a personal installation

# Development

Development is *not* done on master.  We use a dev branch named for
the dev version of ack.  If the current version is 2.00, then the
next release version is 2.02, and our dev releases will be 2.0101,
2.0102, etc.  Therefore, the branch will be "dev201".
