Speed up bash filter function to run commands consecutively instead of per line - bash

Question

I have written the following filter as a function in my ~/.bash_profile:
hilite() {
export REGEX_SED=$(echo $1 | sed "s/[|()]/\\\&/g")
while read line
do
echo $line | egrep "$1" | sed "s/$REGEX_SED/\x1b[7m&\x1b[0m/g"
done
exit 0
}
to find lines of anything piped into it matching a regular expression, and highlight matches using ANSI escape codes on a VT100-compatible terminal.
For example, the following finds and highlights the strings bin, U or 1 which are whole words in the last 10 lines of /etc/passwd:
tail /etc/passwd | hilite "\b(bin|[U1])\b"
However, the script runs very slowly as each line forks an echo, egrep and sed.
In this case, it would be more efficient to do egrep on the entire input, and then run sed on its output.
How can I modify my function to do this? I would prefer to not create any temporary files if possible.
P.S. Is there another way to find and highlight lines in a similar way?

Answer 1

sed can do a bit of grepping itself: if you give it the -n flag (or #n instruction in a script) it won't echo any output unless asked. So
while read line
do
echo $line | egrep "$1" | sed "s/$REGEX_SED/\x1b[7m&\x1b[0m/g"
done
could be simplified to
sed -n "s/$REGEX_SED/\x1b[7m&\x1b[0m/gp"
EDIT:
Here's the whole function:
hilite() {
REGEX_SED=$(echo $1 | sed "s/[|()]/\\\&/g");
sed -n "s/$REGEX_SED/\x1b[7m&\x1b[0m/gp"
}
That's all there is to it - no while loop, reading, grepping, etc.

Answer 2

If your egrep supports --color, just put this in .bash_profile:
hilite() { command egrep --color=auto "$#"; }
(Personally, I would name the function egrep; hence the usage of command).

Answer 3

I think you can replace the whole while loop with simply
sed -n "s/$REGEX_SED/\x1b[7m&\x1b[0m/gp"
because sed can read from stdin line-by-line so you don't need read
I'm not sure if running egrep and piping to sed is faster than using sed alone, but you can always compare using time.
Edit: added -n and p to sed to print only highlighted lines.

Answer 4

Well, you could simply do this:
egrep "$1" $line | sed "s/$REGEX_SED/\x1b[7m&\x1b[0m/g"
But I'm not sure that it'll be that much faster ; )

Answer 5

Just for the record, this is a method using a temporary file:
hilite() {
export REGEX_SED=$(echo $1 | sed "s/[|()]/\\\&/g")
export FILE=$2
if [ -z "$FILE" ]
then
export FILE=~/tmp
echo -n > $FILE
while read line
do
echo $line >> $FILE
done
fi
egrep "$1" $FILE | sed "s/$REGEX_SED/\x1b[7m&\x1b[0m/g"
return $?
}
which also takes a file/pathname as the second argument, for case like
cat /etc/passwd | hilite "\b(bin|[U1])\b"