Grep_color on mac

Question

I am trying to get my regex highlighted on mac using terminal. I have put this is my .profile:

export GREP_COLOR='1;30;40'

Nothing changes, so I added the same to my bash.profile still nothing, restarted the machine nothing. When I am:

egrep --color=auto ".*\W blah blah "

then it lights up some yellow color but I wondered if I had done something wrong in my .profile or bash_profile.

Any help would be good: snow leopard, with just plain old terminal :-)

Answer 1

This worked on my snow leopard machine. Try just copying and pasting the text in your terminal and seeing if grep shows the desired behavior. If it does, then the problem is you're not adding it to the right dotfile. What shell are you using? The dotfile you should add it to depends on the shell you use.

export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=auto'
export GREP_COLOR='1;30;40'

Also, try running printenv to see what environmental variables you already have set and see if any grep options are already.

Answer 2

I don't think Snow Leopard's default setting is to use color for grep. I've had success on my OS X box with adding a line like alias grep=grep --color=always in my .bashrc to ensure consistent highlighting.

Answer 3

It's not bash.profile nor bash_profile, it's .bash_profile.

As for the colors on your Mac, just put this in your ~/.bash_profile:

export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=auto'
export GREP_COLOR='1;30;40'

Be sure to use .bash_profile in your home directory (~/).