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

I use following command for similar purpose:

grep -C 100 searchtext file

This will say grep to print 100 * 2 lines of context, before & after of the highlighted search text.

Answer 2

I added this to my .bash_aliases:

highlight() {
  grep --color -E "$1|\$"
}

Answer 3

Ok, this is one way,

wc -l filename

will give you the line count -- say NN, then you can do

grep -C NN --color=always filename