The colorgcc is a perl script written by Jamie Moyers to colorize the terminal output of C++, CC, CCACHE, G++, GCC so error messages can be found within longer compiler outputs. Homepage: http://schlueters.de/colorgcc.html Usage: Call the compiler name with the 'color-' prefix, eg: color-gcc color-g++ color-cc color-c++ That's it. Alternatively you may want to create following handy aliases: alias gcc='color-gcc' alias g++='color-g++' alias cc='color-cc' alias c++='color-c++' The default settings can be overridden with ~/.colorgccrc. See the comments in the packaged sample config file for more information. Note: colorgcc will only emit color codes if: (1) Its STDOUT is a tty and (2) the value of $TERM is not listed in the "nocolor" option. If colorgcc colorizes the output, the compiler's STDERR will be combined with STDOUT. Otherwise, colorgcc just passes the output from the compiler through without modification.