Pro Tips: Color Your Tail With Perl

We ran into a situation today where our JEE server was logging everything twice.  Sadly, this meant that errors and warnings were logged as INFO and were missed.

2011-03-22 11:40:40,884 INFO  [STDOUT] (main) 11:40:40,884 WARN [ProcessRoles] Could NOT find role XXXX

Since we watched the logs most often using the tail command, the quick and dirty solution was to have tail output lines containing WARN/ERROR/SEVERE in different colors that would stand out as the scrolled past.  The bash/perl script below is the fruit of my hacking.  Suggestions for improvements welcome.

t() {
tail -100f $1 | perl -pe 's/^.*SEVERE.*$/\e[1;37;45m$&\e[0m/g' | perl -pe 's/^.*ERROR.*$/\e[1;37;41m$&\e[0m/g' | perl -pe 's/^.*WARN.*$/\e[1;33;40m$&\e[0m/g'
}