Reading files in reverse with tac

Today's article is going to cover a command that falls into the “I don't use this often, but when I do it's awesome” category.

The tac command is very similar to the cat command in that it is used to concatenate and print files. However there is one very large difference, the tac command does this in reverse, starting with the last line of the file and working its way up to the first line.

Using tac

Reading a file normally with cat

$ cat sample.txt 
This is line 1
This is line 2
This is line 3
This is line 4
This is line 5

Reading a file in reverse with tac

$ tac sample.txt 
This is line 5
This is line 4
This is line 3
This is line 2
This is line 1

Printing standard input in reverse with tac

$ grep "line [3-5]" sample.txt | tac
This is line 5
This is line 4
This is line 3

When would you use tac?

To be frank, I've only used tac on a hand full of occasions. Most of the times where I used tac I later found out there was another way to get the same results. Either way here is a list of scenarios that I came up with where tac could be useful.

If someone removed the tail binary…

$ tac sample.txt | head -n 2 | tac
This is line 4
This is line 5

Iterating through a for loops input backwards

$ for x in `find ./ -type d | tac`; do echo $x; done
./directory2/1
./directory2/91
./directory2/81
./directory2/

Got any other use cases? Throw them in the comments, I would love to hear how folks have used tac in their daily lives.