How to highlight entire line on matching a word within the line in egrep?

Question

Currently, I use

egrep --color 'error|$'

to highlight every word in a line containing the word error:

enter image description here

I would like to highlight the entire line though so that the entire string appears in red.

How can I achieve that?

@don_crissti I also want to see the lines not matching the pattern. — k0pernikus, Dec 15 '16 at 11:59
yeah, I got it... see the suggested duplicate and also How to have tail -f show colored output — don_crissti, Dec 15 '16 at 12:00
@Costas Exaclty what I was looking for. Please provide as answer, bonus point for explaining why it does what it does :) — k0pernikus, Dec 15 '16 at 13:28

Anthony Geoghegan · Accepted Answer · 2016-12-15T15:32:58.960

7

To highlight the complete line, you should expand the regex so that it includes all (if any) characters before and after the desired term. Do this by prepending and appending .* to the term being searched for:

echo "foo bar error baz" | egrep --color '.*error.*|$'

edited Dec 15 '16 at 15:32

answered Dec 15 '16 at 13:05

Anthony Geoghegan

12,950

This will hide the other content not matching the pattern. I want to keep it. – k0pernikus Dec 15 '16 at 13:28
@k0pernikus Sorry, I omitted the |$ in the regex while testing. I've fixed that now. – Anthony Geoghegan Dec 15 '16 at 15:33

How to highlight entire line on matching a word within the line in egrep?

1 Answers1