Colorized grep — viewing the entire file with highlighted matches

by

Here are some ways to do it:

grep --color 'pattern\|$' file
grep --color -E 'pattern|$' file
egrep --color 'pattern|$' file

The | symbol is the OR operator. Either escape it using \ or tell grep that the search text has to be interpreted as regular expressions by adding -E or using the egrep command instead of grep.

The search text “pattern|$” is actually a trick, it will match lines that have pattern OR lines that have an end. Because all lines have an end, all lines are matched, but the end of a line isn’t actually any characters, so it won’t be colored.

To also pass the colored parts through pipes, e.g. towards less, provide the always parameter to --color:

grep --color=always 'pattern\|$' file | less -r
grep --color=always -E 'pattern|$' file | less -r
egrep --color=always 'pattern|$' file | less -r

More Related Contents:

  1. Capturing Groups From a Grep RegEx
  2. How to get the part of a file after the first line that matches a regular expression
  3. How to process each output line in a loop?
  4. Checking if output of a command contains a certain string in a shell script
  5. Can colorized output be captured via shell redirect? [duplicate]
  6. How to check if a file contains a specific string using Bash
  7. Piping tail output though grep twice
  8. Waiting for background processes to finish before exiting script
  9. Grep output with multiple Colors?
  10. How to strip out all of the links of an HTML file in Bash or grep or batch and store them in a text file
  11. How to grep for case insensitive string in a file?
  12. How to check if a variable is set in Bash
  13. Can I export a variable to the environment from a Bash script without sourcing it?
  14. redirect COPY of stdout to log file from within bash script itself
  15. Count occurrences of a char in a string using Bash
  16. Shell: How to call one shell script from another shell script?
  17. How to redirect output of an entire shell script within the script itself?
  18. Quick-and-dirty way to ensure only one instance of a shell script is running at a time
  19. Process all arguments except the first one (in a bash script)
  20. How to represent multiple conditions in a shell if statement?
  21. How to split one string into multiple strings separated by at least one space in bash shell?
  22. Generating permutations using bash
  23. What does the Bash operator
  24. What is the exact meaning of IFS=$’\n’?
  25. Longest line in a file
  26. What does “plus colon” (“+:”) mean in shell script expressions?
  27. Running shell command that has nested quotes via ssh
  28. How to reload .bash_profile from the command line
  29. Escaping forward slashes in sed command [duplicate]
  30. BASH: Writing a Script to Recursively Travel a Directory of N Levels

Leave a Comment