Every once in awhile I come across a feature of a piece of software, generally, a small utility that I hadn’t known about and that shows immediate value. Today Jon showed me the --color flag for GNU grep. It uses color to highlight the term you were searching for in the line returned. For example:
# grep –color=auto -i metadata todo.txt
Metadata Functions to Move:
MetadataView…Make sure only our indexed items are passed up.
Its a very simple thing, but one of those that I’m surpised I haven’t been using. I know have a shell aliases for that. See the grep documentation for more information.
[Update 6/2: linux.com has a great article on GNU grep's new features which talks about the color. One that I'm particularly expected about is the ability to use Perl-style regular expressions.]