Search And Highlight With Grep

14th July 2008 - 1 minute read time

Note: This post is over a year old and so the information contained here might be out of date. If you do spot something please leave a comment and I will endeavour to correct.

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

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

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