how to Color part of text of a output to a console

Question

Is there a way to color particular words printed on console based on user preference?

For example I need to color text 'error' when a particular program is compiled.

Answer 1

You'll need to work with the output and some script/alias. Check So You Like Colors for reference of how to use colors in terminal.
Example:

gcc main.c 2>&1 | sed -e 's/\(error\)/^[[1;31m\1^[[m/'

BEWARE: the first ^[ above is a escape sequence, press Ctrl-V + ESC to create them.
I'm redirection 2>&1 stderr to stdout and replacing sed error with error in bold and red color. And finally reseting colors and attributes back to normal ^[[m.

Result in that: You should setup some script/alias in your ~/.bashrc.

Answer 2

That case has probably been already done, see the colorgcc script.