soveran / hi

Filter lines from stdin matching a given string

hi

Filter lines from stdin matching a given string.

Description

Read from stdin and display only the lines containing an exact match of the passed text. The matching text is highlighted when stdout is a TTY.

Examples

$ cat foo
foo
bar
baz

$ cat foo | hi ba
bar
baz

Or just redirecting stdin:

$ < foo hi ba
bar
baz

It's not shown in this README, but ba will be highlighted.

You can also apply hi multiple times:

$ cat foo | hi ba | hi r
bar

And in this case, only r will be highlighted.

Installation

Install hi into /usr/local/bin with the following command:

$ make install

You can use make PREFIX=/some/other/directory install if you wish to use a different destination. If you want to remove hi from your system, use make uninstall.

Motivation

The original use case was to grep a very large file. For that specific use case I didn't need to match a pattern: a strict match was good enough. That meant I could also make it faster. While developing this quick solution for a very specific problem, I decided to highlight the matching text so that I could construct the resulting set of lines incrementally. In the end, the tool turned out to be useful by itself, and it can be combined with other tools if different features are needed. For example, if I want to print the line numbers along with the matched lines, I can use cat -n file | hi foo.

Contributing

If you find a bug, please create an issue detailing the ways to reproduce it. If you have a suggestion, create an issue detailing the use case.