I'd like to know if I can colour highlight the output of a shell command that matches certain strings.
For example, if I run myCommand, with the output below:
> myCommand
DEBUG foo bar
INFO bla bla
ERROR yak yak
I'd like all lines matching ^ERROR\s.* to be highlighted red.
Similarly, I'd like the same highlighting to be applied to the output of grep, less etc...
EDIT: I probably should mention that ideally I'd like to enable this feature globally via a 'profile' option in my .bashrc.
There is an answer in superuser.com:
your-command | grep -E --color 'pattern|$'
or
your-command | grep --color 'pattern\|$'
This will "match your pattern or the end-of-line on each line. Only the pattern is highlighted..."
You can use programs such as:
You can do something like this, but the commands won't see a tty (some will refuse to run or behave differently or do weird things):
exec > >(histring -fEi error) # Bash
If you want to enable this globally, you'll want a terminal feature, not a process that you pipe output into, because a pipe would be disruptive to some command (two problems are that stdout and stderr would appear out-of-order and buffered, and that some commands just behave differently when outputting to a terminal).
I don't know of any “conventional” terminal with this feature. It's easily done in Emacs, in a term
buffer: configure font-lock-keywords
for term-mode
.
However, you should think carefully whether you really want that feature all the time. What if the command has its own colors (e.g. grep --color
, ls --color
)? Maybe it would be better to define a short alias to a colorizer command and run myCommand 2>&1|c
when you want to colorize myCommand
's output. You could also alias some specific always-colorize commands.
Note that the return status of a pipeline is its last command, so if you run myCommand | c
, you'll get the status of c
, not myCommand
. Here's a bash wrapper that avoids this problem, which you can use as w myCommand
:
w () {
"$@" | c
return $PIPESTATUS[0]
}
You could try (maybe needs a bit more escaping):
BLUE="$(tput setaf 4)"
BLACK="$(tput sgr0)"
command | sed "s/^ERROR /${BLUE}ERROR ${BLACK}/g"
Try
tail -f yourfile.log | egrep --color 'DEBUG|'
where DEBUG is the text you want to highlight.
You can use the hl command avalaible on github :
git clone http://github.com/mbornet-hl/hl
Then :
myCommand | hl -r '^ERROR.*'
You can use the $HOME/.hl.cfg configuration file to simplify the command line.
hl is written in C (source is available).
You can use up to 42 differents colors of text.
Use awk.
COLORIZE_AWK_COMMAND='{ print $0 }'
if [ -n "$COLORIZE" ]; then
COLORIZE_AWK_COMMAND='
/pattern1/ { printf "\033[1;30m" }
/pattern2/ { printf "\033[1;31m" }
// { print $0 "\033[0m"; }'
fi
then later you can pipe your output
... | awk "$COLORIZE_AWK_COMMAND"
printf is used in the patterns so we don't print a newline, just set the color.
You could probably enable it for specific commands using aliases and user defined shell functions wihtout too much trouble. If your coloring errors I assume you want to process stderr. Since stderr in unbuffered you would probably want to line buffer it by sending through a fifo.
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