How to highlight a word in the output of “cat”?

I can do the following to see if some word is available in the output of “cat”:

cat filename | grep word

This filters the output and shows only those lines which contain “word”. Now, is it possible to only highlight the “word” in the output, without dropping other lines?

Answers:

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Method 1

You can grep for an EOL along with your real query (if you already have an alias for grep to use --color, as is default in many distributions, you can omit it in the following examples):

grep --color=auto 'word|$' file

Since the EOL is not a real character, it won’t highlight anything, but it will match all lines.

If you would prefer not to have to escape the pipe character, you can use extended regular expressions:

grep -E --color=auto 'word|$' file

Method 2

If you haven’t GNU grep available, here is something more portable:

grepc()
{
  pattern=$1
  shift
  esc=$(printf "33")
  sed 's"'"$pattern"'"'$esc'[32m&'$esc'[0m"g' "<a href="https://getridbug.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="341074">[email protected]</a>"
}

You can customize the color using one of these codes

30m black
31m red
32m green
33m yellow
34m blue
35m magenta
36m cyan
37m white

Using 7m instead of a color code will put the string in reverse video.


All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0

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