Highlight

Originally written by Dave Goodell

Forked and improved by Scott Baker

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Usage:

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,--'

Params:

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.

Notes:

Highlight requires a 256 color capable terminal. If you're still running a 16 color terminal this will probably look pretty ugly.

Colors:

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.

Examples:

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