Perl's Term::ANSIColor is good but sometime it's overkill. I wrote a function to change colors before your print.

$color = color("13_on_5");
$reset = color("reset");

print $color . "Pink on purple" . $reset . "\n";

The ANSI color numbers can be determined using term-colors.pl.

# String format: '115', '165_bold', '10_on_140', 'reset', 'on_173', 'red', 'white_on_blue'
sub color {
    my ($str, $txt) = @_;

    # If we're NOT connected to a an interactive terminal don't do color
    if (-t STDOUT == 0) { return $txt || ""; }

    # No string sent in, so we just reset
    if (!length($str) || $str eq 'reset') { return "\e[0m"; }

    # Some predefined colors
    my %color_map = qw(red 160 blue 27 green 34 yellow 226 orange 214 purple 93 white 15 black 0);
    $str =~ s|([A-Za-z]+)|$color_map{$1} // $1|eg;

    # Get foreground/background and any commands
    my ($fc,$cmd) = $str =~ /^(\d{1,3})?_?(\w+)?$/g;
    my ($bc)      = $str =~ /on_(\d{1,3})$/g;

    if (defined($fc) && int($fc) > 255) { $fc = undef; } # above 255 is invalid

    # Some predefined commands
    my %cmd_map = qw(bold 1 italic 3 underline 4 blink 5 inverse 7);
    my $cmd_num = $cmd_map{$cmd // 0};

    my $ret = '';
    if ($cmd_num)      { $ret .= "\e[${cmd_num}m"; }
    if (defined($fc))  { $ret .= "\e[38;5;${fc}m"; }
    if (defined($bc))  { $ret .= "\e[48;5;${bc}m"; }
    if (defined($txt)) { $ret .= $txt . "\e[0m";   }

    return $ret;
}

Note: You can test if you're outputting to a TTY which supports ANSI colors, or a file using the -t test.

See also: Regexp to check for ANSI color codes
See also: Tests