¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Every macOS upgrade comes with disappointment and sorrow in the form of some tool, dependency / library or system-wide configuration breaking¹.

This time: the upgrade to macOS Sequoia (15.0) broke ack (Perl).

% ack
zsh: /opt/homebrew/bin/ack: bad interpreter: /usr/bin/perl5.30: no such file or directory

I desperately needed to use ack, however there was no internet connection. And I didn’t have any of its alternatives installed (e.g. ag, ripgrep / rg).

Then the best way is to fall back to good ol’ grep²:

% grep [-l] '\bref\b' **/*

Alternatively, within a git repository, there is git grep:

% git grep [-l] '\bref\b'

With git grep there is no need to specify which files to grep, as it entails all files that belong to the repository…which happens to be a caveat for newly created files that were not yet git add-ed.