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

Answer 1

Maybe this is an XY problem, and what you are really trying to do is to highlight occurrences of words as they appear in your shell. If so, you may be able to use your terminal emulator for this. For instance, in Konsole, start Find (ctrl+shift+F) and type your word. The word will then be highlighted whenever it occurs in new or existing output until you cancel the function.

Answer 2

If you are looking for a pattern in a directory recursively, you can either first save it to file.

ls -1R ./ | list-of-files.txt

And then grep that, or pipe it to the grep search

ls -1R | grep --color -rE '[A-Z]|'

This will look of listing all files, but colour the ones with uppercase letters. If you remove the last | you will only see the matches.

I use this to find images named badly with upper case for example, but normal grep does not show the path for each file just once per directory so this way I can see context.

Answer 3

You can make sure that all lines match but there is nothing to highlight on irrelevant matches

egrep --color 'apple|' test.txt 

Notes:

• egrep may be spelled also grep -E
• --color is usually default in most distributions
• some variants of grep will "optimize" the empty match, so you might want to use "apple|$" instead (see: https://stackoverflow.com/a/13979036/939457)

Answer 4

Since you want matches highlighted, this is probably for human consumption (as opposed to piping to another program for instance), so a nice solution would be to use:

less -p <your-pattern> <your-file>

And if you don't care about case sensitivity:

less -i -p <your-pattern> <your-file>

This also has the advantage of having pages, which is nice when having to go through a long output

Answer 5

If you want to print "all" lines, there is a simple working solution:

grep "test" -A 9999999 -B 9999999

• A => After
• B => Before

Answer 6

If you are doing this because you want more context in your search, you can do this:

cat BIG_FILE.txt | less

Doing a search in less should highlight your search terms.

Or pipe the output to your favorite editor. One example:

cat BIG_FILE.txt | vim -

Then search/highlight/replace.