I was bored, so I started to implement ack (http://betterthangrep.com/) in awk. It is a very simplistic version of ack.

Usage: ./awck search_pattern [path]

examples: ./awck debugger jquery.js ./awck [0-9]+ ../jquery.js

Since it is not as featureful as ack (but gets the job done), it seems to be a bit faster than ack.

time ack [0-9]+ jquery.js > /dev/null

real 0m0.188s user 0m0.071s sys 0m0.055s

time ./awck [0-9]+ jquery.js > /dev/null

real 0m0.022s user 0m0.015s sys 0m0.005s

TODO:

• The ability to ignore non-code files (turn this thing from grep to ack).