How to reverse lines of a text file?

Question

I'm writing a small shell script that needs to reverse the lines of a text file. Is there a standard filter command to do this sort of thing?

My specific application is that I'm getting a list of Git commit identifiers, and I want to process them in reverse order:

git log --pretty=oneline work...master | grep -v DEBUG: | cut -d' ' -f1 | reverse

The best I've come up with is to implement reverse like this:

... | cat -b | sort -rn | cut -f2-

This uses cat to number every line, then sort to sort them in descending numeric order (which ends up reversing the whole file), then cut to remove the unneeded line number.

The above works for my application, but may fail in the general case because cat -b only numbers nonblank lines.

Is there a better, more general way to do this?

Answer 1

In GNU coreutils, there's tac(1)

Answer 2

There is a command for your purpose:

tail -r file.txt

• Prints the lines of file.txt in reverse order!
• The -r flag is non-standard, may not work on all systems, works e.g. on macOS.
• Beware: Amount of lines limited. Works mostly, but when working with huge files be careful and check.

Answer 3

Answer is not 42 but tac.

Edit: Slower but more memory consuming using sed

sed 'x;1!H;$!d;x'

and even longer

perl -e'print reverse<>'

Answer 4

Similar to the sed example above, using perl - maybe more memorable (depending on how your brain is wired):

perl -e 'print reverse <>'

Answer 5

cat -b only numbers nonblank lines"

If that's the only issue you want to avoid, then why not use "cat -n" to number all the lines?

Answer 6

In this case, just use --reverse:

$ git log --reverse --pretty=oneline work...master | grep -v DEBUG: | cut -d' ' -f1

Answer 7

:   "@(#)$Id: reverse.sh,v 1.2 1997/06/02 21:45:00 johnl Exp $"
#
#   Reverse the order of the lines in each file

awk ' { printf("%d:%s\n", NR, $0);}' $* |
sort -t: +0nr -1 |
sed 's/^[0-9][0-9]*://'

Works like a charm for me...

Answer 8

awk '{a[i++]=$0}END{for(;i-->0;)print a[i]}'

More faster than sed and compatible for embed devices like openwrt.

Answer 9

rev <name of your text file.txt>

You can even do this:

echo <whatever you want to type>|rev