Ccat is a simple CLI tool for Linux that brings colors and decorations to your files and command outputs. To achieve this, it surrounds patterns with ANSI escape sequences. Better than a long speech, watch the video below!
Current features (version 1.1):
- 3 decorations: bold, italic, underline
- 8 colors: black, red, green, brown, blue, magenta, cyan, white
- colorize patterns based on POSIX extended regular expressions
- colorize regexp sub matches
- export coloration results to HTML files
Download, compile and install with:
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/v14dz/ccat
cd ccat
make
sudo make install
After the make install command, the ccat is placed under the
/usr/local/bin/ directory.
Usage is obtained with the -h option:
usage: ./ccat [options] [color1[:decoration1] pattern1] [[color2[:decoration2] pattern2] ...] [filename]
-c|--config <cfg> Use configuration file
-g|--group Only colorize sub matches (use parentheses)
-h|--help Display this help
-t|--html Set output as HTML
-v|--version Display current version
Possible colors are: black red green brown blue magenta cyan white
Possible decorations are: 'b' (bold) 'i' (italic) or 'u' (underline)
Colorizes the /etc/passwd file to have the "root" string in red and
default shells in green and underlined (note that patterns can be
POSIX extended regular expressions):
ccat red 'root' green:underline ':[^:]+$' /etc/passwd
Colorizes an input string (received from stdin):
echo {a..h} | ccat black 'a' red 'b' green 'c' brown 'd' \
blue 'e' magenta 'f' cyan 'g' white 'h'
Colorizes sub matches fields (with -g):
echo "xxxxxx" | ccat -g green '(.).(.).(.).' cyan '.(.).(.).(.)'
Colorizes a log file (/var/log/messages) and highlight critical keywords
with bold red:
ccat -g green '^(.*\s\w{2}:\w{2}:\w{2})\s\S+\s+\S+: .*$' \
blue '^.*\s\w{2}:\w{2}:\w{2}\s(\S+)\s+\S+: .*$' \
cyan '^.*\s\w{2}:\w{2}:\w{2}\s\S+\s+(\S+): .*$' \
red:b '(error|failed|corrupt)' \
/var/log/messages
Colorizes the output of an hex dump and highlight a specific byte:
xxd /tmp/data.dump | ccat cyan:b '^[0-f]+:' blue:i ' .*$' red:u '92'
Ccat parameters are sometime long to type or remember, fortunately you can
store those parameters to a configuration file. Syntax is really simple,
for example, the following configuration file, colorizes and display the
file /var/log/messages:
# Configuration file to display message with ccat.
filename /var/log/messages
flags g
# Colors
green ^(.*\s\w{2}:\w{2}:\w{2})\s\S+\s+\S+: .*$
blue ^.*\s\w{2}:\w{2}:\w{2}\s(\S+)\s+\S+: .*$
cyan ^.*\s\w{2}:\w{2}:\w{2}\s\S+\s+(\S+): .*$
red:b (error|failed|corrupt)
Note that flags value may contains any letter that matches a flag option (i.e. g for group, t for html and so on). This configuration file will produce the same output of the command show previously if invoked with:
ccat -c ./messages.cfg
You may want to apply the same settings to colorize another file
(/var/log/messages.1 for instance), in this case use:
ccat -c ./messages.cfg /var/log/messages.1
You may also want to add more color/pattern pairs to the command line:
ccat -c ./messages.cfg red '(failure)'
To save a colored output exported to an HTML file:
ccat --html -c ./messages.cfg > /tmp/messages.html
Configuration files shipped with the sources (i.e. those in the
configs directory) are copied under the
/usr/local/etc/ccat/ directory. To store your own configuration files,
place them in ~/.config/ccat/ (and keep the *.cfg extension). Once
a configuration file is placed either in the system directory
(/usr/local/etc/ccat/) or in a user directory (~/.config/ccat/), it can
be used by specifying it's name, for instance:
ccat -c messages /var/log/messages.1