Grep – Getting Colored Results When Using a Pipe from Grep to Less

colorsgreplesspipe

I use the –colour option of grep a lot, but I often use less as well. How can I pipe grep results to less and still preserve the coloring. (Or is that possible?)

grep "search-string" -R * --colour | less

EDIT:

I'm looking for a direct solution or anything equivalent to this.

Best Answer

When you simply run grep --color it implies grep --color=auto which detects whether the output is a terminal and if so enables colors. However, when it detects a pipe it disables coloring. The following command:

grep --color=always -R "search string" * | less

Will always enable coloring and override the automatic detection, and you will get the color highlighting in less.

EDIT: Although using just less works for me, perhaps older version require the -R flag to handle colors, as therefromhere suggested.

Related Solutions

Less – How to Reduce Interruptions in Less

Normally all processes in a pipeline run in the same process group, causing all of them to receive the signal. You can use setsid foo | less to run foo in a different pgrp.

Macos – How to perform a second grep on the files returned from a previous grep

grep -lZ "first string" * | xargs -0 grep -l "second string"

First grep will return the files containing first string.
Second grep will do the same for second string, but over the results from the first grep.
The -Z argument to grep and the -0 argument to xargs work together to enable support for filenames that include spaces.

Edit - thanks to Ajedi32:

xargs lets you use the results from a command as the arguments to another.

From the xargs's Wikipedia article, xargs is a command on Unix and most Unix-like operating systems used to build and execute command lines from standard input.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Less – How to Reduce Interruptions in Less

Macos – How to perform a second grep on the files returned from a previous grep

Related Question