Highlight text similar to grep, but don't filter out text [duplicate]

Answer 1

Use ack. Checkout its --passthru option here: ack. It has the added benefit of allowing full perl regular expressions.

$ ack --passthru 'pattern1' file_name

$ command_here | ack --passthru 'pattern1'

You can also do it using grep like this:

$ grep --color -E '^|pattern1|pattern2' file_name

$ command_here | grep --color -E '^|pattern1|pattern2'

This will match all lines and highlight the patterns. The ^ matches every start of line, but won't get printed/highlighted since it's not a character.

(Note that most of the setups will use --color by default. You may not need that flag).