rpen

rpen - red pencil, is a simple multicolor command-line tool to filter and highlight the output text.

I always had problems with filtering out large continuous text, i.e. text that you want to filter out of log files with cat or something similar. So I needed a tool that makes it easy to see what I'm actually looking for.

Requirements

• Python 2.5x, 2.7x or Python 3.x
• egrep or grep, grep should be GNU Version 3.x

Setup Linux

git clone https://github.com/rtulke/rpen.git
cp rpen/rpen.py /usr/local/bin/rpen
chmod 777 /usr/local/bin/rpen

Setup MacOS X

Mac OS X uses the BSD grep or egrep which is not 100% compatible with Linux grep/egrep. Therefore it requires an additional -e "OK" which must be used directly in the code.

Otherwise you will get this error message: "egrep: empty (sub)expression"

Usage

$ rpen
Usage: cat logfile | rpen [options] searchterm1 searchterm2...

Options:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit
  -i          perform a case insensitive search
  -k          only highlight, do not filter

Examples

cat /foo/bar | rpen searchstring1 searchstring2 .. 

or try less with RAW mode:

cat /foo/bar | rpen searchstring1 searchstring2 .. | less -R 

rpen with regex:

cat /foo/bar | rpen ^.*[04]

highlight whole line:

cat /foo/bar | rpen ^.\*searchstring\*.$

cat /foo/bar | rpen -i Searchstring1 searchString2 .. | less -R