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I have a command which generates colored output. I wish to grep the plain text of that command (while still preserving the color) for brackets. If I grep -F '[', every line matches, due to the color codes.

How can I grep for brackets (or other plain text features) without losing the color?

Note: There are similar posts about grepping the color codes, or preserving the color, neither of which help here.

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    You need to search for a longer pattern, something that excludes the color escapes while passing what you are looking for. Without having any idea of what you are looking for, we can't guess.
    – user10489
    Jan 2, 2022 at 17:19

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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You can do something like that:

$ printf "1st line \033[31m RED literal [ \033[0m NORMAL \n2nd line \033[31m RED \033[0m NORMAL \n" | while IFS=; read -r line
do
    if echo "$line" | ansifilter | grep -F '[' >/dev/null
    then
        echo "$line"
    fi
done
1st line  RED literal [  NORMAL

You have to have ansifilter installed.

Notice that is not very effective because grep is called on every line but it should work fine for small inputs.

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