Originally written by Dave Goodell
Forked and improved by Scott Baker
highlight <PATTERN0> [PATTERN1...]
highlight [--filter COLOR,PATTERN] [--filter COLOR,PATTERN] ...
This program takes text via STDIN and outputs it with the given regex patterns highlighted with using color. If no color option is specified, highlight will default to a pre-selected array of colors.
Example: cat logfile.txt | highlight --filter 'green,pass' --filter 'red,fail'
If your filter contains capturing parens, only the captured text will be
highlighted. If this is not the behavior you want you can use non-capturing
parens, or use the --full_matches param.
Highlight uses Vim style smartcase matching. If your filter contains a capital
letter then matches are case-sensitive, otherwise they are case-insensitive.
Options for --case_sensitive and --case_insensitive are available as overrides.
If your match pattern begins with a dash, you will have to use the --filter syntax
so highlight can differtiate between a filter and a param.
Example: cat README.md | highlight --filter 'green,--'
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
--bold |
output matched patterns using bold font |
--case_insensitive -i |
pattern matching is not case sensitive (default) |
--case_sensitive |
pattern matching is case sensitive |
--file |
read patterns from a file |
--filter -f |
a color and pattern pair (separated by a comma) |
--force |
force coloring on, even when not connected to a terminal |
--full_matches |
colorize entire match, not just captured parens |
--help |
show command usage |
Note: Patterns read from a file are one per line. If lines are tab separated,
they use advanced --filter COLOR,PATTERN style syntax. Where the COLOR is the
first column, one or more tabs, and then PATTERN.
Highlight requires a 256 color capable terminal. If you're still running a 16 color terminal this will probably look pretty ugly.
Filters use the color of the ANSI numbers available in the term-colors.pl
script in the extras/ directory. Alternately some colors can be defined as a
string shortcut: red, blue, green, yellow, orange, purple, white, and black.
cat README.md | highlight colors? by 'pattern[\ds]?' text program with '\bhighlight\b'
cat nagios.log | highlight --filter '11,\bWARNING\b' --filter '82,\bOK\b' --filter '196,\bCRITICAL\b'
cat messages.log | highlight --file /tmp/patterns.txt