TAC(1)

💅 TAC(1) — the tac manual, but make it cute 💅

okay so this is the User Contributed Perl Documentation page for tac, and it's literally about concatenate and print files in reverse. bestie, it's giving reverse-order realness, no cap 💅

---

🌸 NAME 🌸

tac — concatenate and print files in reverse. that's the whole vibe 🦋

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

tac [-Bbr] [-s separator] [-S bytes] [file...]

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

tac copies files or standard input to standard output, but with the order of records reversed. it's the reverse girlie of the file world, okay? main character energy fr fr, iykyk 🌈

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -b — Attach separator to the beginning of the record that it precedes in the file. 🎀
• -B — Read files in binary mode. 💻
• -r — The separator is a regular expression. 🔥
• -s STRING — Use STRING as record separator. Set to '' for paragraph mode. Defaults to newline. 🍓
• -S BYTES — Number of bytes to read at a time. Defaults to 8192. ✨

🦋 NOTES 🦋

1. -B and -S are peculiar to this implementation of tac. 🫶
2. Regular expressions are as in Perl with some caveats: 💜
3. /foo(bar)/ — Do not use capturing parenthesis. They will conflict with tac's internal use of them. 😭
4. /foo|bar/ — Alternation may match out of sequence, because matches are made against chunks of files rather than whole files. Set -S to a suitably large number to avoid this. 💀

👑 AUTHOR 👑

The Perl implementation of tac was written by Tim Gim Yee, tim.gim.yee@gmail.com. 💌 iconic.

🌈 COPYRIGHT and LICENSE 🌈

This program is copyright (c) Tim Gim Yee 1999. 👑

This program is free and open software. You may use, modify, distribute, and sell this program (and any modified variants) in any way you wish, provided you do not restrict others from doing the same. 🌸

---

kisses bestie 💖 this page is from perl v5.42.2, dated 2026-02-15, and it's TAC(1) — slay.