For a while I have been trying to convince myself to write a script for filtering grep output when searching code trees, especially ones versioned with Subversion or so. Then I made some googling around to see if anybody made it already. I was lucky, someone already written a tool called ack. It searches recursively filtering almost anything that will not make sense; such as binaries, backup files of editors, version control system files and so on. It also has very nicely formatted colorful output.
Here it can be found:
