How do I change the order in which grep looks at files/prints results?

Question

I have a directory with a bunch of files with numerical filenames. They don't have leading zeroes, so if I do something like grep hello * in that directory I might get something like this:

22:hello, world!
6:hello
62:"Say hello to them for me."

I'd rather have the result be like this:

6:hello
22:hello, world!
62:"Say hello to them for me."

The first thought that occured to me was to sort the results numerically with grep hello * | sort -n but then I lose grep's colors, which I'd like to keep. What's the best way to do that?

I suggest changing the title to "how not lose color in grep" or something like that. Keep the current title inside the question text(description). This way, people will not incorrectly redirect questions here. It is better for community s it is a question that comes high in searches. — Sohail Si, May 11 '22 at 08:48

score 12 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 14 '13 at 02:37

12

ls * | sort -n | xargs -d '\n' grep hello

answered Jun 14 '13 at 02:37

John Kugelman

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Thanks! So what that xargs command does is take standard input, split it by newlines, and then append the results to "grep hello" as arguments, then? – Pandu Jun 14 '13 at 02:50
@pandubear Yes, exactly. Couldn't have said it better. – John Kugelman Jun 14 '13 at 02:51
you can also add `-H` option to `grep` to print the filename for each match (to have same output as `grep -R`) – botchniaque Aug 02 '17 at 21:04
@ShichengGuo Could you post that as a new question? – John Kugelman Jan 19 '22 at 18:08
For me `sort --version-sort` worked better, so @JohnKugelman command would be `ls * | sort --version-sort | xargs -d '\n' grep hello` – zergussino May 09 '23 at 15:21

Pandu · Answer 2 · 2022-04-04T17:53:45.750

4

Ah -- grep suppresses its colors when its output is a pipe (which is probably a good thing). But this can be overridden by supplying --color=always, which makes the | sort -n approach work:

grep --color=always hello * | sort -n

edited Apr 04 '22 at 17:53

answered Jan 23 '22 at 23:21

Pandu

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How do I change the order in which grep looks at files/prints results?

2 Answers2