Title: tac Author: Unknown off the net long ago, and Jay Lepreau Computer Science Dept. Univ. of Utah Salt Lake City, UT 84112 801-581-4285 Net: lepreau@utah-cs.arpa, {ihnp4,decvax}!utah-cs!lepreau Sometime lepreau@cs.utah.edu tac ("cat" backwards) is a small program which prints file segments in reverse order; by default it reverses by lines (like tail -r). Besides being able to reverse a file by segments delimited by an arbitrary string, its wins are that it is very fast, handles any size segments and any size files. These make it an excellent filter, e.g. "tac | egrep foo". tmail is a trivial shell script which uses tac to display one's mailbox, message by message, most recent first. Potential improvements to tac which I would appreciate having fed back to me: --segment by arbitrary regular expressions, but only if it's done w/o sacrificing the current speed for the default case. --fix up handling of multiple files. --nicely integrate with tail somehow. 1/11/86