Is there an easy way to COLOR-CODE the compiler outputs?

Question

gcc (or other compilers) often generate huge text output and it's very difficult to see where the error is or miss warnings. I've done some search but havn't found a clean simple solution to color code the compiler output (so for instance warnings are yellow, errors are red, etc...)

Solution 1

here's an alternative if you are looking for something very simple:

#!/bin/bash -e

make ${@} 2>&1 | perl -wln -M'Term::ANSIColor' -e '
m/Building|gcc|g++|\bCC\b|\bcc\b/ and print "\e[1;32m", "$_", "\e[0m"
or
m/Error/i and print "\e[1;91m", "$_", "\e[0m"
or
m/Warning/i and print "\e[1;93m", "$_", "\e[0m"
or
m/Linking|\.a\b/ and print "\e[1;36m", "$_", "\e[0m"
or
print; '

Just alias your make to this script and make sure it's executable...

Solution 2

Gcc 4.9 seems to have added this feature via the -fdiagnostics-color flag:

Solution 3

Debian and Ubuntu gives the colorgcc package for that purpose.

And I usually run gcc (and make) thru emacs with M-x compile then the messages are colorized.

addenda

GCC 4.9 has a native colorization facility and GCC 6 - released end of April 2016 - (and probably GCC 5 too) is enabling it by default (when stdout is a terminal).

Solution 4

Ok, I'll just leave a notice about my own (python based) tool also :)

It is called Pluggable Output Processor and designed not only to colorize output of one particular program. Here is sample GCC output before:

After:

Solution 5

See colorgcc, a perl script that coulours the gcc output.

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