Can I configure terminal to show stderr output in different colour Is it possible to configure the terminal in OS X to show stderr output automatically in a different colour than stdout output from a process?

Or is this only possible if the process is outputting coloured output?
There is no straightforward solution, but there are at least a few workarounds available to do this.


You can install hilite by building the single C file (hilite.c in this case) or by using brew install hilite (with homebrew installed on the system). Use it as hilite &lt;command&gt;.
You can use the command from this answer on serverfault (substitute command with the name of your script/command) to make stderr appear in red (for other colors, refer the ANSI escape sequences list and change the 31m in the below command accordingly):

command 2&gt; &gt;(while read line; do echo -e "\e[01;31m$line\e[0m" &gt;&amp;2; done)

You can use stderred to color stderr in red.