Grep in Mac OS X's terminal — only displaying one color

Question

I am used to grep being able to color the filename, the line number, and the match itself. These three ought to be different colors. This works flawlessly on a Linux terminal and even MinGW on Windows, but on OS X even if I set GREP_COLOR I can only get color on the matched result.

Is the version of grep packaged with the OS too old?

10.7.3 on MBA 13" with Terminal.app.

Answer 1

As Ignacio already said, OS X grep is a bit outdated (it's version 2.5.1). You can install the latest GNU grep though.

As always, you can install most missing Linux tools on OS X through Homebrew, but its policy is not to offer duplicates for system tools. There's an alternative repository for these dupes, but you have to "tap" it first:

brew tap homebrew/dupes/

Then you can install the new grep (version 2.11 as of May 2012):

brew install homebrew/dupes/grep

Be aware that /usr/bin still comes first in your PATH, so you need /usr/local/bin/grep for the new version.

Answer 2

Correct. Multiple colors were first supported in GNU grep 2.5.3.