Colortail Colortail works like tail but can optionally read one or more config files where it's specified which patterns results in which colors. Colortail uses regular expressions (see regex(7)) to determine which lines and parts of lines to print in which colors. If you experience issues with color working, add the following line to your .bashrc or /etc/profile alias colortail='colortail --config=/etc/colortail/default.conf'