no-herd taviso@gentoo.org Tavis Ormandy mtail is a small tail workalike that performs output coloring using ansi escape sequences (although the sequences are overridable, so you could cause it to output something else, e.g. html font tags, if you really wanted to). mtail is written in python, is fairly small, and should be relatively platform-independent. it has a config file that can contain an arbitrary number of entries, each of which has a series of regular expressions to indicate which files to color according to which entry. for each entry, the config file specifies a coloring scheme using regular expressions and, optionally, filters to apply to each line before coloring (for example, to strip out extra info, etc.). the config file also may override the predefined colors and the escape sequences (or whatever) actually used to perform the coloring. for details see the sample config file. mtail was inspired primarily by my dissatisfaction with colortail, which was written in c++, but i have since seen several other similar utilities, mostly in python, most notably generic colouriser and pctail. i believe that mtail offers various advantages over each of these other tools, including ease of configurability, lack of odd command-line options, and overall simplicity. for further information, see the README.