Command-Line Highlighter

I was grepping through some logs the other day at home and I figured "wouldn't it be nice if I could pipe this through something that would highlight lines matching a regex instead of just having grep pull those lines out?" Wouldn't you know it, such a tool doesn't exist, as far as I can tell. Which is very weird, since I've already found it VERY useful...

grep *will* give you context lines if you ask for them explicitly, ie: give me 2 lines before and 4 after the matching line, but I wanted to see ALL the output, with the matches highlighted for easy-spotting.

Anyways, I wrote a little perl script to do the work - it just inserts 'standard' shell color-escape sequences before and after the matching word/line to highlight it (in bright-green-on-black by default... if you're a Matrix fan/l33t hax0r and use a green-on-black setup anyways, there's an option that lets you change the highlighting colors.

It's fairly basic at the moment, but I plan on porting this to C as soon as I have time (possibly tonight) now that it's up on SourceForge, and modify it a bit so that the options/usage syntax matches grep wherever possible/appropriate.

HighLite