Search And Highlight With Grep

14th July 2008 - 1 minute read time

Searching for things in many files is easy with the grep command, but in order to view the results with the expression results highlighted you need to use grep in conjunction with less.

grep expression *.txt | less +/expression

If you wanted to search all files called something.txt for the letter d you would use this line.

grep d *.txt | less +/d
shell

Comments

nicer option would be - alias grep='grep --color=auto'

Submitted by hdaz on Fri, 12/12/2014 - 11:18

Permalink

Add new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

Related Content

Timing Page Responses With Curl

27th March 2022

Timing web requests is possible in curl using the -w or --write-out flag. This flag takes a number of different options, including several time based options.

Read more

Repointing A Symlink To A Different Location

10th December 2020

​Creating a symlink is a common way of ensuring that the directory structure of a deployment will always be the same. For example you might create a symlink so that the release directory of release123/docroot will instead be just current.

Read more

Grep Context

27th June 2020

Grep is a really powerful tool for finding things in files. I often use it to scan for plugins in the Drupal codebase or to scan through a CSV or log file for data.

For example, to scan for user centric ViewsFilter plugins in the Drupal core directory use this command (assuming you are relative to the core directory).

Read more

Checking Domain TTL Values

4th January 2019

Part of the process of putting a new site live can be moving DNS entries around. Prior to doing this it's a really good idea to sort out the Time To Live (TTL) of the DNS record so that when you do change DNS entries you aren't waiting around for a day for the DNS to sort itself out.

Read more