[greyboy]

That's a fine recommendation for machines that you solely work on, or have complete control over. However, it's good to be able to work with the standard toolset if you frequently work on a variety of remote machines (where it's quite common that you cannot install such things, due to permissions or policies, and want to get started working before attempting to download/install a bunch of custom binaries).

Edit: MattJ100 made a more clear point while I was responding.

[pooriaazimi]

Thanks for the response. However, a nice thing about ack is that it's not a binary (necessarily) - it's a perl script and can be used without sysadmin permissions: http://betterthangrep.com/install/

The other points are quite understandable and correct though. It's always best to at least be familiar with standard tools, even if you want to use an slightly different version for yourself.

[greyboy]

I think we're probably mostly in agreement, even if I wasn't clear about it. In my line of work, there have been times where I was not permitted to use external scripts or binaries (highly sensitive environments). However, that one small example doesn't mean ack should be disregarded!