Highlight function with grep

bash, Uncategorized / By

It’s been a while since I have been blogging, so I will have to start fresh.

I recently came across this gem which defines a bash function named “highlight” which will highlight the first argument in all subsequent files. if only 1 argument is given, it expects console input for highlighting.

/usr/local/bin/highlight

#!/bin/bash

highlight()
{
  if [ 1 -eq $# ];
  then
    grep --color -E "$1|$"
  else
    grep --color -E "$1|$" "${@:1}"
  fi
}

highlight $@

Realworld examples:

tail -f /var/log/messages|highlight sshd
tail -f /var/log/audit/audit.log|grep avc||highlight denied
highlight “failed” /var/log/secure