Colorized grep — viewing the entire file with highlighted matches

Question

I find grep\'s --color=always flag to be tremendously useful. However, grep only prints lines with matches (unless you ask for context lines). Give

Answer 1

Is there some way I can tell grep to print every line being read regardless of whether there's a match?

Option -C999 will do the trick in the absence of an option to display all context lines. Most other grep variants support this too. However: 1) no output is produced when no match is found and 2) this option has a negative impact on grep's efficiency: when the -C value is large this many lines may have to be temporarily stored in memory for grep to determine which lines of context to display when a match occurs. Note that grep implementations do not load input files but rather reads a few lines or use a sliding window over the input. The "before part" of the context has to be kept in a window (memory) to output the "before" context lines later when a match is found.

A pattern such as ^|PATTERN or PATTERN|$ or any empty-matching sub-pattern for that matter such as [^ -~]?|PATTERN is a nice trick. However, 1) these patterns don't show non-matching lines highlighted as context and 2) this can't be used in combination with some other grep options, such as -F and -w for example.

So none of these approaches are satisfying to me. I'm using ugrep, and enhanced grep with option -y to efficiently display all non-matching output as color-highlighted context lines. Other grep-like tools such as ag and ripgrep also offer a pass-through option. But ugrep is compatible with GNU/BSD grep and offers a superset of grep options like -y and -Q. For example, here is what option -y shows when combined with -Q (interactive query UI to enter patterns):

ugrep -Q -y FILE ...

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

One other answer mentioned grep's -Cn switch which includes n lines of Context. I sometimes do this with n=99 as a quick-and-dirty way of getting [at least] a screenfull of context when the egrep pattern seems too fiddly, or when I'm on a machine on which I've not installed rcg and/or ccze.

I recently discovered ccze which is a more powerful colorizer. My only complaint is that it is screen-oriented (like less, which I never use for that reason) unless you specify the -A switch for "raw ANSI" output.

+1 for the rcg mention above. It is still my favorite since it is so simple to customize in an alias. Something like this is usually in my ~/.bashrc:

alias tailc='tail -f /my/app/log/file | rcg send "BOLD GREEN" receive "CYAN" error "RED"'

Answer 4

Use colout program: http://nojhan.github.io/colout/

It is designed to add color highlights to a text stream. Given a regex and a color (e.g. "red"), it reproduces a text stream with matches highlighted. e.g:

# cat logfile but highlight instances of 'ERROR' in red
colout ERROR red <logfile

You can chain multiple invocations to add multiple different color highlights:

tail -f /var/log/nginx/access.log | \
    colout ' 5\d\d ' red | \
    colout ' 4\d\d ' yellow | \
    colout ' 3\d\d ' cyan | \
    colout ' 2\d\d ' green

Or you can achieve the same thing by using a regex with N groups (parenthesised parts of the regex), followed by a comma separated list of N colors.

vagrant status | \
    colout \
        '\''(^.+  running)|(^.+suspended)|(^.+not running)'\'' \
        green,yellow,red

Answer 5

I'd like to recommend ack -- better than grep, a power search tool for programmers.

$ ack --color --passthru --pager="${PAGER:-less -R}" pattern files

$ ack --color --passthru pattern files | less -R

$ export ACK_PAGER_COLOR="${PAGER:-less -R}"
$ ack --passthru pattern files

I love it because it defaults to recursive searching of directories (and does so much smarter than grep -r), supports full Perl regular expressions (rather than the POSIXish regex(3)), and has a much nicer context display when searching many files.

Answer 6

Here's something along the same lines. Chances are, you'll be using less anyway, so try this:

less -p pattern file

It will highlight the pattern and jump to the first occurrence of it in the file.

You can jump to the next occurence with n and to the previous occurence with p. Quit with q.