Jason Porrit commented on that post and mentioned “ack”:http://search.cpan.org/~petdance/ack-1.75_01/ack , a perl alternative to grep and find which offers terminal color highlighting to your results. I also found this morning a ruby alternative called “rak”:http://rak.rubyforge.org

All of these utilities do the same thing, they search a directory structure for files whose contents match a given pattern.

Here’s Ack

Here’s Rak

Here’s findit

Overall ack and rak beat out findit, but findit has a much better name. I think I’ll just alias findit to rak. (yes I”m biased to ruby code over perl code).

The only thing ack and rak are missing is a filename only option. If I can find every file matching a pattern from a given start directory that would rid me of findfile as well!