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I've checked out a lot of links on how to grep individual escape characters or literal strings, but I just cannot get them to combine to find the background-red ANSI escape sequence ^[41m, even typing the ^[ as both Ctrl+V+Ctrl+[ and the two literal characters ^+[ and using both the -E and -F flags.

The raw bytes I am trying to find, given by hexdump are:

1b 5b 33 37 6d 1b 5b 34 31 6d 30 2e 30 30 25

Where this corresponds to WHITE FOREGROUND RED BACKGROUND 0.00%. I'm producing these codes with Python's colorama package and Fore.WHITE+Back.RED, just in case anyone is curious.

So, what is the secret I am missing?

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  • What is the problem of \grep '\^\[41m' ? Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 7:41
  • Doesn't work for me with GNU grep 2.16. Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 7:45
  • Can you attach the part of ^[41m content of the target file ? Use hexdump -C <filename>. I have no problem to grep it with GNU grep 2.16. Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 8:42

1 Answer 1

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but I just cannot get them to combine to find the background-red ANSI escape sequence ^[41m

If you use vim to open this file, you will know it's not ^[41m, instead it's ^[[41m, which ^[ navigate by arrow key as a set:

enter image description here

1b is Escape represent by single escape character ^[ which can be invoked by Ctrl+V follow by Esc. ^[ look like 2 characters but it's not, it's single:

xb@dnxb:~/Downloads/grep$ ascii 1b ASCII 1/11 is decimal 027, hex 1b, octal 033, bits 00011011: called ^[, ESC Official name: Escape xb@dnxb:~/Downloads/grep$

Do this (Use Ctrl+V follow by Esc to create ^[, then continuously type \[41m):

xb@dnxb:~/Downloads/grep$ hexdump -C /tmp/2 00000000 1b 5b 33 37 6d 1b 5b 34 31 6d 30 2e 30 30 25 0a |.[37m.[41m0.00%.| 00000010 xb@dnxb:~/Downloads/grep$ \grep '^[\[41m' /tmp/2 0.00% xb@dnxb:~/Downloads/grep$ \grep '^[\[41m' /tmp/2 | hexdump -C 00000000 1b 5b 33 37 6d 1b 5b 34 31 6d 30 2e 30 30 25 0a |.[37m.[41m0.00%.| 00000010 xb@dnxb:~/Downloads/grep$

Ensure you escape grep by prefix \ to avoid its alias --color affect:

enter image description here

[Alternative]:

  1. \grep -P '\e\[41m' (Credit: OP's comment)
  2. \grep '^[\[41m' , which use Ctrl+V follow by Ctrl+[ to create ^[. Useful when backspace in my keyboard is not 0x08, but i can use Ctrl+V follow by Ctrl+H (^H get from ascii 08) to produce it.
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    Thank you for that - I see the problem was mostly me not realising there was both a [ from the ^[ and the literal [. Since my initial post, I'd also discovered that \grep -P "\e\[41m" is an alternative. Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 23:54
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    \grep $'^\x1b\[41m' will work without perl regex or inserting a literal escape sequence, so it is editor friendly and works on mac. Commented Aug 28, 2019 at 14:16

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