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Ccat

Description

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!

asciicast

Features

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

Installation

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

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'

Configuration files

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