clide is a program for color formating text in files for display mostly in terminals using ANSI escape sequences.
To install clide, simply run
make make install (as root)
There is also an rpm spec build file included so that you can make your own RPM if you want, or you can download the premade RPM from the clide website at http://suso.suso.org/xulu/clide
You can use it in a command pipeline or by running it against a file or multiple files that are passed as arguments. In order to colorize or add attributes to the text like bold or underline, you need to do one of two things. The first way is to use the -e option and pass a search expression along with the colors and attributes you want to set for search matches. For example, this is done like so:
clide -e /search/,fg=red fileinput.txt
The second method is to create an expression file that has saved search patterns, one per line. The syntax is exactly the same as what is passed to the -e option. To specify an expression file, use the -f option. For example, if you had a expression config file called lsfilter.conf with the following contents:
# This is a comment
# Make directory entries show in blue
/^d.*/,fg=blue,bold
# Use a strong color and make blink world writable file entries.
/^.rw.rw.rw./,fg=yellow,bold,blink
# Show files with a .conf or .cnf at the ne of their name in magenta
/\b.*\.co?nf$/,fg=magenta
You could use that expression file like this:
ls -l | clide -f ~/.clide/lsfilter.conf
Its strongly recommended that you read the man page. If you didn't install clide yet, then you can view the man page by running
perldoc /path/to/clide