tail, with specific pattern colored
tail -F file | egrep --color 'pattern|$'
OR
tail -f file | egrep --color=always $\|PATTERN
tail -f file | egrep --color=always $\|"PATTERN1|PATTERN2"
tail with coloured output with the help of perl - need more colours? here is a colour table: http://www.tuxify.de/?p=23 Show Sample Output
tail -f FILE | perl -pe 's/KEYWORD/\e[1;31;43m$&\e[0m/g'
Colorize matching string without skipping others this is useful to highlight only some code without losing other lines (eg. software, logs, scripts)
egrep --color=auto 'usb|' /var/log/messages
