ack misses results (vs. grep)

Posted by techpeace on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by techpeace
Published on 2010-06-14T16:29:24Z Indexed on 2010/06/14 16:32 UTC
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I'm sure I'm misunderstanding something about ack's file/directory ignore defaults, but perhaps somebody could shed some light on this for me:

mbuck$ grep logout -R app/views/
Binary file app/views/shared/._header.html.erb.bak.swp matches
Binary file app/views/shared/._header.html.erb.swp matches
app/views/shared/_header.html.erb.bak: <%= link_to logout_text, logout_path, { :title => logout_text, :class => 'login-menuitem' } %>
mbuck$ ack logout app/views/
mbuck$

Whereas...

mbuck$ ack -u logout app/views/
Binary file app/views/shared/._header.html.erb.bak.swp matches
Binary file app/views/shared/._header.html.erb.swp matches
app/views/shared/_header.html.erb.bak
98:<%= link_to logout_text, logout_path, { :title => logout_text, :class => 'login-menuitem' } %>

Simply calling ack without options can't find the result within a .bak file, but calling with the --unrestricted option can find the result. As far as I can tell, though, ack does not ignore .bak files by default.

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