I grep a lot; but sometimes, I only have a vague idea of what I'm looking for, so my results can be looong. So I typically pipe it into less and boom, I can page through it. But when I do this, I always lose my coloring :(
But I ran into this neat little trick today:
Before (old way I used to do it):
grep foo * --color | less
Now:
grep foo * --color=always | less -R
Tada! Ok so a little explanation. The color option (turned off by default, which is why we included the flag) actually has three possible values you can assign to it.
1. color=never - Pretty self explanatory
2. color=always - Always include the special control characters to color the text
3. color=auto - Include the special control characters unless you are piping to something or redirecting to a file
So in this case, we need to use color=always.
Now the 'less' part. Most versions of less will not correctly interpret the special control characters. If you run less without -R, you will probably see a lot of added junk in your output. -R or --RAW-CONTROL-CHARS (the longer name is pretty descriptive in what it does) allows less to interpret the special control characters.
Ok that's it. Use it and love it.
