Colorize tail output

Question

I\'ve been trying to make tail a little more readable for server startups. My current command filters out most of the INFO and DEBUG messages from the startup:

Answer 1

I wrote a script for this years ago. You can easily cover the case of multiple colors by piping successive invocations of highlight to each other.

From the README:

Usage: ./highlight [-i] [--color=COLOR_STRING] [--]  [PATTERN1...]

This is highlight version 1.0.

This program takes text via standard input and outputs it with the given
perlre(1) pattern(s) highlighted with the given color.  If no color option
is specified, it defaults to 'bold red'.  Colors may be anything
that Perl's Term::ANSIColor understands.  This program is similar to
"grep --color PATTERN" except both matching and non-matching lines are
printed.

The default color can be selected via the $HIGHLIGHT_COLOR environment
variable.  The command-line option takes precedence.

Passing -i or --ignore-case will enable case-insensitive matching.

If your pattern begins with a dash ('-'), you can pass a '--' argument
after any options and before your pattern to distinguish it from an
option.