How can I grep with color in Mac OS X's terminal?

Question

I recently found that on Mac OS X I can set this up in my shell ~/.profile so that when I use grep it will print the matches in color (white one red).

alias grep='GREP_COLOR="1;37;41" LANG=C grep --color=auto'

But setting up an alias seems like kind of a hack way to do this. Previously I had tried with no luck:

export GREP_COLOR=always           # works fine in Linux

And then I also tried:

export GREP_COLOR="1;37;41"

Is there a better way to do this than setting up an alias?

Solution

Per Grep_color on mac as suggested by @lupincho, this seems to work fine and does not use an alias:

export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=always'
export GREP_COLOR='1;35;40'

Comments

[Breno Macena]

Didn't work for me. :(

[Mike Nguyen]

Did you restart your terminal ?

[joelittlejohn]

Have a +1 for this as a good solution, however setting GREP_OPTIONS leads to grep: warning: GREP_OPTIONS is deprecated; please use an alias or script. Something like this is now preferred: alias grep="`which grep` --color=always"

[rfabbri]

@joelittlejohn doesn't work when using grep in pipes with xargs, eg: find /usr/share -name '*.txt' |xargs grep testing

[rcreswick]

@joelittlejohn's comment makes this a non-starter for me; it prints that warning on every grep command (so, many, many times on a find operation).

[joelittlejohn]

@rfabbri I guess that's one to take up with the grep team who deprecated this :)

[Akavall]

For some reason for me I did not see an effect after I opened a new terminal, but source ~/.bashrc did it.

[Sampo]

--color=alwaysis dangerous. Scripts run from the shell will also inherit the option and cause very mysterious failures when grep starts injecting color codes to output inside scripts. --color=auto doesn't cause this problem.

[cde]

@joelittlejohn that is not true for the default grep in OSX. Even on High Sierra 10.13, it uses FREEBSD grep 2.5.1 which HAS NOT depreciated GREP_OPTIONS. That's only true in gnu/grep