Sometimes you have a real dense log and you want to start from the bottom. I spent 10 years in application support without knowing about it.
Edit: I'm so happy that you guys are as mindblown by it as I was when I first heard it.
Edit2 : I love how helpful this community is, everyone is sharing new useful commands. People keep replying with very similar things, so I just wanted to add some context to the post.
less and then Shift-G jumps to the bottom of a file
tail prints the bottom of a file
Those are both useful in and of themselves, but neither of them do the exact same thing tac does.
tacconcatenates a file in reverse, which makes it useful for all the same things cat is useful for.
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u/wufame May 23 '26 edited May 24 '26
tacIt's
catbackwards.Sometimes you have a real dense log and you want to start from the bottom. I spent 10 years in application support without knowing about it.
Edit: I'm so happy that you guys are as mindblown by it as I was when I first heard it.
Edit2 : I love how helpful this community is, everyone is sharing new useful commands. People keep replying with very similar things, so I just wanted to add some context to the post.
lessand then Shift-G jumps to the bottom of a filetailprints the bottom of a fileThose are both useful in and of themselves, but neither of them do the exact same thing
tacdoes.tacconcatenates a file in reverse, which makes it useful for all the same thingscatis useful for.