grep with less and color

When you simply run grep --color it implies grep --color=auto which detects whether the output is a terminal and if so enables colors. However, when it detects a pipe it disables coloring. The following command:

grep --color=always -R "search string" * | less -R

Will always enable coloring and override the automatic detection, and you will get the color highlighting in less.




You can add these to your bashrc aliases:


alias grep='grep --color=always'
alias less='less -R'