[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!