Syntax highlighting/colorizing cat

Question

Is there a method to colorize the output of cat, the way grep does.

For grep, in most consoles it displays a colored output hi

Answer 1

I have written the small script to perform the colourization using pygmentize.

colorize_via_pygmentize() {
    if [ ! -x "$(which pygmentize)" ]; then
        echo "package \'Pygments\' is not installed!"
        return -1
    fi

    if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
        pygmentize -g $@
    fi

    for FNAME in $@
    do
        filename=$(basename "$FNAME")
        lexer=`pygmentize -N \"$filename\"`
        if [ "Z$lexer" != "Ztext" ]; then
            pygmentize -l $lexer "$FNAME"
        else
            pygmentize -g "$FNAME"
        fi
    done
}

And then make an alias to script. alias cat=colorize_via_pygmentize. Also dont forget to save this in ~/.bashrc.