Hightlighting in bash

[Philip Prindeville]

Hi.

First off, this isn't a bug report so much as a feature request.

I do a lot of cross-compilation of linux and various packages for embedded 
distros.

Version bumps are always perilous because cross-compilation often suffers 
regression.

The problem is that a lot of the regressions don't cause the build to fail... 
it just generates invalid results.

Sometimes (not often but sometimes) an innocuous clue with will buried deep within 
thousands (or tends of thousands) of lines of "make all" output.

And by output, I mean STDERR.

My request is simple.  Using termcap/ncurses info (which you need anyway for the readline 
stuff), it would be nice to have the option of running commands in a pseudo-tty and then 
bracketing the output from STDERR with <highlight on>...<highlight off>.

Of course, that also implies that your writes to wherever STDERR eventually 
goes are atomic and won't be interspersed with output from STDOUT.  I'll let 
someone more intimate with the particulars of stdio and tty drivers and line 
disciplines figure that bit out.

This would be nice because it would allow one to quickly identify and isolate 
potentially detrimental error messages from mundane but profuse output that 
logs commands being invoked, etc.

Does this seem doable?

Thanks,

-Philip