Spice up your Terminal with colored grep pattern results
11 comments Latest by Dan Johnson Sun, 07 Oct 2007 21:38:51 GMT
Earlier, I came across a post by Garry Dolley, which he shows how to acheive colorized grep matches in bash. I recall having color matches when I used to use Linux on a daily basis as my primary work environment, but haven’t gotten around to setting this up on my MacBook, which is where I do almost all of my development work.
Before
If you don’t already have colors, a grep in your terminal might look something like the following screenshot.
While, I have a very small output here, this gets much crazier when you’re using egrep across an entire project. It’s hard to scan through all of the results for the inline pattern matches.
So, taking Garry’s suggestion (for bash), I did something similar with my favorite shell, Z shell.
Add the following to your ~/.zshrc file to begin experimenting with the colors.
export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=auto'
export GREP_COLOR='1;36'
After
With the new variables defined in my .zshrc, I can now start to see colors showing up in my grep results.
Pretty cool, huh?
Variants
To save you the trouble of trying tons of combinations yourself, which I suspect you’ll do anyways, here are some other variants.
Blinking
If you change the first number in GREP_COLOR to 5, you’re matches will !
You’ll have to experiment with this yourself as I’m not going to make a video for you. ;-)
export GREP_COLOR='5;35'
Inverted Colors
You can also invert the colors so that the background color changes on your pattern matches.
For example:
To achieve this, you can set the first number in GREP_COLOR to 7.
...and so much more
I decided to write a quick and ugly ruby script to iterate through the color combinations that I was trying.
Anyhow, I’ll leave you on that note. If you figure out how to do any other fun things with grep colors, do let me know. :-)
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Wow, this is slick! Thanks!
My grep is now coloured with 7;33. Thanks for posting this. :-)
The nice thing about
--color=auto(in contrast to--color=always) is that it won’t colorize anything unless the output goes to a terminal. Therefore you can safely pipe output to, say,/usr/bin/less, without seeing the color control characters.Yeah Garry knows some dope rails magic, he also has some good postings on git.
Nice screenshots! I never knew about the blink code either ;)
Yeah, the blinking one is cool, but it can be overwhelming when you get a lot results. ;-)
Just to throw a curveball into this lovefest: I highly recommend you have a look at “ack”, Andy Lester’s perl based grep replacement. Why would you want to do that? Well, it works beautifully out of the box, ignores svn/cvs/backup files out of the box, is already configured to search, say, just ruby files in your source tree, etc etc.
So a simple
shows all occurrences of “double digits” in .rhtml,.rb,.rjs files beneath your current directory, grouped by file, with coloured output.
See
use.perl.org
if you’re interested. Yes, it’s perl, but you can forget that once it’s installed (if you must…).
My gawd! That is the first time I have seen a blink tag an a loooooong time :) Cool grep coloring tute!
Ha ha ha, I considered myself a shell junkie, but the idea of having a blinking match made feel a old shell junkie with a tocuh of HTML 1.0
You can make the colorizing work with less too. With the—color=auto grep won’t output the colorizing control codes unless it is outputing to a terminal. Similarly “less” won’t render them.
grep -Ri—color=always ruby rubygems-0.9.0 | less -R
gave me gobs of red highlighted lines to scroll through.
You can make the colorizing work with less too. With the—color=auto grep won’t output the colorizing control codes unless it is outputing to a terminal. Similarly “less” won’t render them.
grep -Ri—color=always ruby rubygems-0.9.0 | less -R
gave me gobs of red highlighted lines to scroll through.