Highlight text similar to grep but don t filter out text

Question

When using grep  it will highlight any text in a line with a match to your regular expression   What if I want this behaviour  but have grep print out all lines as well  I came up empty after a quick look through the grep man page

User · Answer

EDIT   This works with OS X Mountain Lion s grep   grep --color -E  pattern1 pattern2      This is better than    pattern1 pattern2  because the   part of the alternation matches at the beginning of the line whereas the   matches at the end of the line  Some regular expression engines won t highlight pattern1 or pattern2 because   already matched and the engine is eager   Something similar happens for  pattern1 pattern2   because the regex engine notices the empty alternation at the end of the pattern string matches the beginning of the subject string    1   http   www regular-expressions info engine html   FIRST EDIT   I ended up using perl   perl -pe  s pattern  033 31 1m  amp  033 30 0m g    This assumes you have an ANSI-compatible terminal   ORIGINAL ANSWER   If you re stuck with a strange grep  this might work   grep -E --color always -A500 -B500  pattern1 pattern2    grep -v   --    Adjust the numbers to get all the lines you want   The second grep just removes extraneous -- lines inserted by the BSD-style grep on Mac OS X Mountain Lion  even when the context of consecutive matches overlap   I thought GNU grep omitted the -- lines when context overlaps  but it s been awhile so maybe I remember wrong

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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  lt your-pattern gt   lt your-file gt    And if you don t care about case sensitivity   less -i -p  lt your-pattern gt   lt your-file gt    This also has the advantage of having pages  which is nice when having to go through a long output

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

You can do it using only grep by    reading the file line by line matching a pattern in each line and highlighting pattern by grep if there is no match  echo the line as is   which gives you the following   while read line   do  echo  line   grep PATTERN     echo  line    done  lt  inputfile

User · Answer

You can use my highlight script from https   github com kepkin dev-shell-essentials  It s better than grep cause you can highlight each match with it s own color     command here   highlight green  input    highlight red  output

User · Answer

If you want to print  all  lines  there is a simple working solution   grep  test  -A 9999999 -B 9999999    A    After B    Before

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

Use ack  Checkout its --passthru option here  ack  It has the added benefit of allowing full perl regular expressions     ack --passthru  pattern1  file name    command here   ack --passthru  pattern1    You can also do it using grep like this     grep --color -E    pattern1 pattern2  file name    command here   grep --color -E    pattern1 pattern2    This will match all lines and highlight the patterns  The   matches every start of line  but won t get printed highlighted since it s not a character    Note that most of the setups will use --color by default  You may not need that flag

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

Examples related to linux

Examples related to grep

Examples related to command-line-interface