How do I get grep color in the file names before each match?

Question

If I run grep -ir "somethingtomatch" . from the current directory, I typically get results like this:

./some/path/file1.html: filecontent filecontent keyword filecontent
./some/path/file2.html: filecontent filecontent filecontent keyword
./some/path/file3.html: filecontent keyword filecontent filecontent
./some/path/file4.html: keyword filecontent filecontent filecontent

I used grep --color=auto -ir 'somethingtomatch" . but it only highlights the keywords in white on a red highlight. I'm trying to get file names on the left color-coded too. How do I do that?

I'm using Terminal.app in OS X with bash and xterm (and I tried xterm-color too).

Answer 1

You can change the colors with the $GREP_COLORS environment variable. In your case, you could try to export GREP_COLORS='fn=1;32' to change the color of the filename to green.

Answer 2

You would have to postprocess the output. Something like this might work:

$ grep --color -ir 'pattern' files | perl -pe 's/^([^:]+):/chomp(my $f = `ls --color \Q$1`); $f/e'

(I'm assuming you're displaying output from a Linux system, since OSX ls doesn't colorize files usefully for this.)

(NB: the distinction between this answer and the $GREP_COLORS one is that the latter uses a fixed color, whereas mine queries ls --color.)

Answer 3

You can use ack, which allows you to set environment variables for filename, line number and the match itself.

http://betterthangrep.com/