Colorized grep — viewing the entire file with highlighted matches

Question

I find grep\'s --color=always flag to be tremendously useful. However, grep only prints lines with matches (unless you ask for context lines). Give

Answer 1

I'd like to recommend ack -- better than grep, a power search tool for programmers.

$ ack --color --passthru --pager="${PAGER:-less -R}" pattern files

$ ack --color --passthru pattern files | less -R

$ export ACK_PAGER_COLOR="${PAGER:-less -R}"
$ ack --passthru pattern files

I love it because it defaults to recursive searching of directories (and does so much smarter than grep -r), supports full Perl regular expressions (rather than the POSIXish regex(3)), and has a much nicer context display when searching many files.