Preserve colouring after piping grep to grep

Question

There is a simlar question in Preserve ls colouring after grep’ing but it annoys me that if you pipe colored grep output into another grep that the coloring is not preserved.

Answer 1

The existing answers only address the case when the FIRST command is grep (as asked by the OP, but this problem arises in other situations too).

More general answer

The basic problem is that the command BEFORE | grep, tries to be "smart" by disabling color when it realizes the output is going to a pipe. This is usually what you want so that ANSI escape codes don't interfere with your downstream program.

But if you want colorized output emanating from earlier commands, you need to force color codes to be produced regardless of the output sink. The forcing mechanism is program-specific.

Git: use -c color.status=always

git -c color.status=always status | grep -v .DS_Store

Note: the -c option must come BEFORE the subcommand status.

Others

(this is a community wiki post so feel free to add yours)