[TUHS] head/sed/tail (was The Unix shell: a 50-year view)

[arnold at skeeve.com]

Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> -r is weird because it enables backwards reading, but only as
> limited by count. Better would be a program, say revfile, that simply
> reads backwards by lines. Then tail p  has an elegant implementation:
>        revfile p | head | revfile

The GNU coreutils provides "tac" (c-a-t backwards) which does that
job. It was adopted from a long-ago posting of same on comp.sources.something.
It should be standard on just about any Linux system.

(It too has too many options, but let's not go there.)

Thanks,

Arnold