TAC(1)

📦
version 9.12 · 23 versions
, in arch rolling

🌸 TAC(1) — bestie edition 🌸

okay so this is tac from GNU coreutils, and yes the name is literally cat backwards, because that is exactly the energy we're bringing 💅

✨ NAME ✨

tac — concatenate and print files in reverse 🦋

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

tac [OPTION]... [FILE]...

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

So here's the tea, bestie 🫖: tac writes each FILE to standard output, last line first. That's it. That's the whole vibe. It's cat but walking backwards through the function like it's leaving a party it didn't want to attend 😭

If you give it no FILE at all, or if FILE is just -, it reads standard input instead. Classic. Love that for us 💖

✨ little housekeeping note: mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too. Like, if it needs a value, it needs a value, no cap.
  • -b, --before — attach the separator before instead of after 🎀
  • -r, --regex — interpret the separator as a regular expression ⭐
  • -s, --separator=STRING — use STRING as the separator instead of a newline 🌸
  • --help — display this help and exit 👑
  • --version — output version information and exit 🌈
🫶 one more thing, and it matters: non-seekable input is buffered to $TMPDIR, defaulting to /tmp. So yeah, your disk is lowkey involved. iykyk.

✨ AUTHOR ✨

Written by Jay Lepreau and David MacKenzie. absolute icons, we stan 🧚

✨ REPORTING BUGS ✨

Found something cursed? Tell the devs, not me 💀

Copyright © 2026 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.

This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. (fr fr, no warranty, don't come for me 🙈)

✨ SEE ALSO ✨

Full documentation <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/tac>

or available locally via: info '(coreutils) tac invocation'

and that's the whole page, bestie!! this one's from GNU coreutils 9.12, dated September 2026, and it was a pleasure doing business with you ✨💖🎀 go reverse some files, you absolute main character 🦋👑

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