update this version does not allow the string to have spaces. Damn. I need to make it smarter about parsing its arguments. In the meantime I've fixed that bug.

This is actually version 2.0 of my previous script. It's all in a single perl executable now, instead of being split into a separate shell script and perl script.

Please use at your own risk. Special characters may give you headaches — if you want to search for some, you'll need a backslash to escape them, and if your directory name has special characters, like |, this script is the least of your worries. Also, I'm no Perl guru, and there's probably some way for a person to pass nasty stuff into the backticks, if they can execute this script with arbitrary arguments.

#!/usr/bin/perl
$string = join " ", @ARGV; # ugly hack; there must be a better way
unless ($string) {
    $error = "Usage: regrep [string]\nRecursively searches all files ";
    $error .= "in current directory for [string]\n";
    print $error;
    exit 1;
}

# Ideally, we'd parse the arguments better.
#$directory = shift @ARGV;
unless ($directory) { $directory = '.'; }

@grepOutput = `egrep -rn --color=always "$string" $directory`;

for $line (@grepOutput) {
    if ($line =~ /^BINARY.*/) {
	; # do nothing
    } elsif ($line =~ /^([^:]*)(:)([^:]*)(:)(.*)/) {
	print "\033[1;34m";
	print $1;
	print "\033[0m";
	print $2;
	print "\033[1;36m";
	print $3;
	print "\033[0m";
	print $4;
	print $5;
	print $6;
	print "\n";
    }
}

No more comments! Either someone has violated Godwin's Law, I'm tired of the discussion or, most likely, the ten-week window has closed. You can, however, contact me through email.