Supress printing of line numbers

[forthrin]

ack v3.4.0 always prints line numbers:

123: Hello, World!

Is there an option to not print line numbers, eg.

Hello, World!

Curiously, the help and man pages say nothing of this fundamental functionality.

#142 might relate to this, but nothing happening there for a couple of years.

Does this mean we are stuck with line numbers?

[petdance]

Can you give a specific command line that you're having problems with?

Does the -h not do what you want?

[forthrin]

-h surpresses both filenames and line numbers (though the latter is not mentioned in the man pages). I want to keep filenames, but surpress line numbers.

   -h, --no-filename
       Suppress the prefixing of filenames on output when multiple files
       are searched.

[petdance]

If I'm understanding, instead of

t/text/amontillado.txt
61:"And yet some fools will have it that his taste is a match for your
98:the foot of the descent, and stood together on the damp ground of
156:"A huge human foot d'or, in a field azure; the foot crushes a serpent

t/text/raven.txt
93:Swung by seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.

you want:

t/text/amontillado.txt
"And yet some fools will have it that his taste is a match for your
the foot of the descent, and stood together on the damp ground of
"A huge human foot d'or, in a field azure; the foot crushes a serpent

t/text/raven.txt
Swung by seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.

Why is that? What's the use case? Not arguing, just trying to understand.

[forthrin]

Exactly. I think it was where the length of the line number string varied from 1 to 4 characters, thereby skewing the text content on lines accordingly, making it difficult to relate them to each other. Suppressing line numbers would seem like a one-liner, though I fully support developer inertia to prevent feature bloat. An alternative would be to right-align the line numbers, eg. printf("%'*d"), though I think suppressing line numbers seems like the proper fix with many potential benefits.

[n1vux]

Knowing how many digits to allow %*d either requires scanning the whole file before output or a heuristic for the largest sensible filesize in lines when the inode only saves filesize in bytes (not even in characters, but bytes).

Not an impossible heuristic: log10($filelength_bytes) is a firm, generous, but not crisp upper bound on number of digits in a linenumber
(assuming we don't count VT as some multiple of CRLFs !!).
(A crisp heuristic that is never wrong will be hard.)

[n1vux]

it may be all the way back in ack1.$large that I last spoke in favor of --[no-]line-number for full control of output, since i don't see my handle on comments on the referenced Ack3.0 ticket nor it's Ack2 precursor.

I support full control of line numbering separable from filenames
since there are times that I do want filenames but not line numbers,
and having filenames once as headers rather than inline as : delimited fields is often preferable (but of course not always)
so the obvious piping to cut -d: -f won't do what i want either.

[n1vux]

I will note a weird workaround that does work - putting the cut into the ack pager option avoids interlining the filename:

ack get_file_id --pager='cut -d: -f2|less -iR'

Not intuitive but it works!

(This workaround could be included pro tempore in Cookbook beyondgrep/website#103 )

[ghost]

Sometimes I find line numbers to be distracting, especially when reading the search result with context option (e.g -C 4). Not having line numbers (along with ":" & "-" prefixes to lines) would help much.