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by petdance 1695 days ago
I'm glad you appreciate that you can install ack anywhere. It's exactly for that use case that I have kept ack able to be a single text file download. Also, it only requires Perl 5.10.1, so it's OK if you're using an old Perl.
1 comments

Hmm — there is a project that allows you to compile a single binary that is cross platform across Linux, Mac and Windows. Wondering if ripgrep can be compiled in such a way and that would make it very close to the portability you have with ack.
That still might run afoul of locked down networks like I've seen at banks. Users couldn't install any binaries at all, but with something like ack it's just cut & paste some text into a text file. ack can literally be a select-all, Ctrl-C, switch windows, "cat > ack", Ctrl-V.