Multiple templates with ack-grep?

Question

Is it possible (and how) to associate templates with ack (ack-grep on some Linux distributions), as I'm used to grep?

eg.

grep "foo" somefile.c | grep -v "bar" 

... to match all lines with "foo" but without "bar".

Answer 1

ack uses Perl regular expressions, and they allow viewing statements :

 ^(?!.*bar).*foo.*$ 

will match a string containing foo but not containing bar .

I am not familiar with using ack , but something like this should work:

 ack '^(?!.*bar).*foo.*$' myfile