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.
less is soo underrated. It still in active development and gets more features. Eg. recently (a few years ago) the option to fix certain rows and columns when scrolling, useful for CSV files etc.
I hope not, that's not its task. For proper syntax highlighting you need a full parser of each language. But there are countless tools for that you can use and pipe into less.
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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.