‘tail -f’ with highlight

This is an example of how you can use tail with colors.

# tail -f /var/log/maillog | perl -pe 's/colorthisword/\e[1;32;40m$&\e[0m/g'

The ;;; values explained

“colorthisword” can be any perl regular expression:

Colors
This vector holds the colors used for SGR control sequences parameters 30 to 37 (foreground colors) and 40 to 47 (background colors).

Note
This only works on ANSI terminals