Using sed to color specific words in Unix consoles
I monitoring live logs bringing out some words is very helpfull. Implementing this in unix console is straightforward.
Let’s you monitor a log with tail
tail -f log.txt
You can color matched words with ANSI Console escape sequences.
tail -f log.txt | sed “s/was/”$(echo -e “\\033[32m”)”WAS”$(echo -e “\\033[0m”)”/g”
This for example translates “pero was here” into “pero WAS here”. Notice the green color.
How it works is that sed replaces every was with WAS + some escape sequences to change color to green and back. -e in echo command makes the \ sequences to work.
You can use this in almost any console.