How to retain grep color when storing in variable or piping to another command?
bash, linux
Solution
Use the option `--color=always`:
data=$(egrep -i --color=always "$search" file.data)
By default, `grep` does not produce color unless the output is going directly to a terminal. This is normally a good thing. The option `--color=always` overrides that.
For occasions when you don't want color, use `--color=never`.
Problem
I'm wanting to use the `grep` in a bash script to find matching lines in a file, highlight the matches with color, and then print out the results in a table using the `column` command. Something like this: ``` data=`cat file.data | egrep -i --color "$search"` echo $'\n'"col1"$'\t'"col2"$'\t'"col3"$'\t'"col4"$'\n'"$data" | column -t -s$'\t' ``` The above code does everything as desired, except that the color is lost. Here's a simplified example: As you can see, when I used `grep` the results were printed on individual lines and in color, but when I save the results to a variable and then print the variable out, the line breaks and colors are gone. Is there any way to do what I'm asking?