Generic Colouriser Generic Colouriser is yet another colorizer for beautifying your logfiles or output of commands.
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ANSI colorizer logfile logfile colorizer ansi colours color control

Generic Colouriser Description

Generic Colouriser is yet another colorizer for beautifying your logfiles or output of commands. Generic Colouriser is yet another colorizer for beautifying your logfiles or output of commands.Being overflooded with different logfile colo(u)?ri(s|z)ers, colortails, gccolors, colormakes and similar programs for making text files or outputs of different programs more readable by inserting ansi colour control codes into them, I decided to write my very own colouriser, eventually providing the functions of all those others.Two programs are provided: grc and grcat. The main is grcat, which acts as a filter, i.e. taking standard input, colourising it and writing to standard output.grcat takes as a parameter the name of configuration file.Directories ~/.grc/, /usr/local/share/grc/, /usr/share/grc/ are searched for the file (in this order). If the file is not found, it is assumed to be an absolute path of a configuration file located elsewhere.Configuration file consists of entries, one per regexp, entries are separated with lines with first character non-alphanumeric (except #). Lines beginning with # or empty lines are ignored. Each entry consists of several lines. Each line has form: keyword=value where keyword is one of: regexp, colours, command, skip, count Only regexp is mandatory, but it does not have much sense by itself unless you specify at least a colour, skip or command keyword as well. regexp is the regular expression to match colours is the list of colours, separated by commas (you can specify only one colour), each colour per one regexp group specified in regexp. if you use special colour name "previous", colour of the previous line of text will be used (actually, if both the first and last character of the previous line are of different colour than the default one, colour of the first one will be used). Another special colour name "unchanged" will leave the colour unchanged, useful if you need some context for matching regular expression and you want to leave the colour of context unchanged.Yet another special name is an arbitrary string enclosed in straight quotes. This string will be inserted directly into the output in front of the matching expression. The string will be eval'ed, so you can use usual python escape sequences. This is useful on a 256-colour enabled xterm, where e.g. colours="33+ colour=green count=more this will match /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin/, /etc/init.d/syslogd and similar strings and paint it with green. Another example: regexp=^-{1,2}s{0,1}$ colours=red count=block - regexp=^s{0,5}$ colours=default count=unblock this will turn all correctly formatted mail signatures red.Regular expressions are evaluated from top to bottom, this allows nested and overlapped expressions. (e.g. you colour everything inside parentheses with one colour, and if a following expression matches the text inside parentheses, it will be also coloured)Typical usage:grcat conf.log < /var/log/syslog/usr/sbin/traceroute www.linux.org | grcat conf.traceroutegrcat conf.esperanto < Fundamento.txt | less -rTo facilitate the use, command grc act as frontend for grcat, automatically choosing the configuration files. grc will execute command command with optional parameters piping its stdout into grcat. Configuration file for grcat is determined by /etc/grc.conf or ~/.grc/grc.conf file.Format of /etc/grc.conf or ~/.grc/grc.conf: each entry consists of 2 lines, between entries there can be any number of empty lines or lines beginning with # (comments)First line is regular expression, second line the name of configuration file for grcat.Configuration file after the first regular expression matching the rest of line after grc will be passed to grcat as its configuration fileFor example, if you have # log file bw+b.*logb conf.log # traceroute command (^|+/)traceroutes conf.traceroute in your /etc/grc.conf, then typing grc cat /var/log/syslog will use conf.log to colourise the output, grc /usr/sbin/traceroute www.linux.org will use conf.traceroute Miscellaneous remarks: You should get yourself familiar with regular expressions. Good reading is at http://www.python.org/doc/howto/regex/regex.html The program is not yet optimized for speed. There are places that can give a big boost if optimized. Regular expressions are handled by python, it means that they may be slightly different from those you know from perl or grep. It's not my fault in that case.Colours are one of: none, default, bold, underline, blink, reverse, concealed, black, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white, on_black, on_green, on_yellow, on_blue, on_magenta, on_cyan, on_white beep on_red means that the background (instead of foreground) is painted with red etc... Additional colours can be: dark, italic, rapidblink, strikethrough. These are supported only on some terminals, so if you want to write portable configuration files, avoid uing them (idea by James Rowe). there can be more attributes per line (separated by space), e.g. # this is probably a pathname regexp=/+ colours=bold blink green count=more will display pathnames in bold blinking greenHint taken from logcoloriser README:To have your syslog show on your tty12 in colour, do: mkfifo /dev/grc replace (or copy and edit) the /etc/syslog.conf line *.info;mail.*;authpriv.*;kern.*;local1.* |/dev/xconsole with : *.info;mail.*;authpriv.*;kern.*;local1.* |/dev/grc and add to your syslog startup script : grcat conf.log < /dev/grc >/dev/tty12 &Well, simpler approach seems to be to use something like thisin your system startup script, if you have GNU tail: tail --follow=name /var/log/syslog | grcat conf.log >/dev/tty12 or, if you have recent BSD tail: tail -F /var/log/syslog | grcat conf.log >/dev/tty12What's New in This Release:· added several non-standard escape attributes (thanks to James Rowe)

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