clide - Man Page

One way to utilize clide is to process the contents of a file or multiple files. This is done simply by passing the files as arguments after the other options you wish to specify for matching expressions:

 clide -e HTMLTAG,fg=yellow index.html

Another way to use clide is by passing the output of one program into it. You are sending the standard output (STDOUT) of one program to the standard input (STDIN) of clide.  Like this command that sends the output of ls through clide, which colors lines that are directory entries:

 ls -l | clide -e /^d.*/,fg=blue,bold

If you are creating more complex search patterns, you are probably going to need to put quotes around the whole argument that is passed to a -e option.  This is because your shell will interpret certain characters like (, ), $, &, [, ], etc. For example, this command uses an expression that will change the percentage display of a filesystem to red if it is 94% or more:

 df -h | clide -e "/(100|9[4-9])%/,fg=red,bold"

But because ( ) is used in most shells as a subshell sequence, you have to put quotes around the whole expression so that its not processed by your shell.

If you're in a hurry and don't want to come up with an expression for matching words or characters that you'd like to highlight, you can use the --highlight option along with a comma seperated list of values you want to match. Like this:

  clide --highlight car,truck,boat insurance-readme.txt

By default clide will highlight these words in yellow.  you can override this with the --highlightattributes option, specifying what you want in the same way you would pass attribute arguments in a -e argument.

You can use the --highlight option in combination with -e of -f options, but the expressions will be applied after the expressions specified with -e or -f.

clide works by passing the expression that you specify into a PERL matching operator. This means that you can pass almost any valid PERL regular expression to clide and it should work as expected.

The only limitation is in what flags you can pass to the search. Currently, you can only pass a 'i' (case insensitive) and/or a 'g' (global search) flag to the search expression. The multiline flag 'm' is not supported.

For more information about perl regular expressions, see the pcre(1) man page.

The basic way to tell clide what text you want to affect is to use the regular expression search operator.  This is passed to the -e option along with a command seperated list of attributes to set.

 clide -e /failed/i,fg=yellow,bg=red,bold

The above expression searches for the word failed (using the i option after the second / means make the search case insensitive). It will change the word failed to have a foreground color of bold yellow (bright) and a background color of red.

A list of helpful predefined search patterns is included with clide to make pattern matching easier for the user. A list of the patterns is available by running clide with the --listdefinitions option.  You can also put your own definitions in files and use the -f option to include them.

Using a predefined search expression is simply a matter of using its name for the first part of the -e argument, like this:

 clide -e HOSTNAME,bold logfile.txt

WARNING: Predefined search patterns MUST use all uppercase names.  In the future clide may have other expression functions that start with lower case letters and there needs to be a way to differentiate between a pattern definition and an operation.

The expression file is pretty simple, you put each expression one per line in exactly the same way that you would pass it to the -e option. expression definitions can be used as the expressions themselves are parsed after all the predefined expressions are read in.  You can include these files using the -f option.

So an expression file called microblogging might look like this:

 HTMLTAG,fg=red,bg=black
 URL,fg=yellow,bold,underline
 TWITTERGROUP,fg=blue,bold
 # Highlight some of my MB account names
 /@(mkrenz|climagic|suso)/,fg=yellow,bg=blue,bold
 TWITTERMENTION,fg=cyan
 IDENTICAGROUP,fg=blue,bold

Then you'd use it like this:

 twidge lsrecent | clide -f ~/.clide/microblogging

Comments can be made using a # character at the beginning of the line.

The definition file has a bit more of a format to it. Each line has two columns seperated by whitespace. The first column is the name of the definition in all uppercase letters. The second column is the search expression starting with a forward slash and terminated by a forward slash and one or more pcre flags (i or g)

 # These are IPs I'm watching out for.
 INTERESTINGIPS /\b(3\.14\.159\.26|206\.97\.64\.[29]|10\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3})\b/g
 # Words I care about.
 LOGINWORDS /(error|failed|failure|success|successful)/gi

Then just include the file using -d for each file you want to include.

Note that you don't need to escape or backslash as much in the searches when you put them in a file as compared with when you specify the pattern on the command line. Keep this in mind if you copy and paste your expressions into a file.