Colorized grep matches

Posted: July 18, 2007, by garry

Why I've been living without this until now is beyond me. I should have known grep had a color option to highlight its matches! Alas, I've been doing grep's in grey this whole time.

Put this in your ~/.bashrc:

export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=auto'
export GREP_COLOR='1;33'

and weep the next time you do a grep.

'1;33' is bright yellow. Change the '1' to a '0' for the dark version of each color. Try values 30 through 37 for other colors.

A complete table of color codes can be found here: http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_43_3926.shtm

Note: not all grep's support this. I'm using "grep (GNU grep) 2.5.1" on OS X, YMMV.

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Older Comments

the daniel on July 18, 2007 02:00 PM

BEAUTIFUL. Let me share my latest grep-related productivity monster – reducing the answer to “shit i want to open all the files in my rails project containing string x in my editor RIGHT NOW” from many characters (grep -rl "string" . | xargs -L1 emacsclient -n -a=vi) into 3 and change:


[daniel@wintermute daniel]$ cat scripts/egr
#/bin/bash

for file in `grep -rl "$1" .`
do
    emacsclient -n -a=vi $file
done

exit 0

Dylan on July 18, 2007 02:42 PM

My god colored grep, where have you been all my life ? Thank you dear scientist :)

garry on July 18, 2007 05:48 PM

Thank you thedaniel for your awesome grep script

sr on August 02, 2007 03:06 AM

You should really try fish as you shell. It have awesome features, such as colored grep, smart completition, etc.

http://fishshell.org

garry on August 10, 2007 02:34 AM

That fishshell does look pretty interesting…

Robby Russell on October 06, 2007 10:44 AM

Thanks for posting this, I wrote up a quick tutorial for doing this with Z shell and added a bunch of screenshots to show color options for people.

Eddie on October 06, 2007 11:06 AM

GREAT tip. Thanks!

Garry on October 06, 2007 01:51 PM

Thanks for the tutorial Robby :)

g on October 06, 2007 03:04 PM

How did I live without this.

thanks!

Hmm? on May 13, 2008 01:30 PM

fish has colored grep by default? I am using fish, and grep is all gray.