GNU bug report logs - #78910
tail does not support -r added by POSIX.1-2024

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From: Pádraig Brady <P <at> draigBrady.com>
To: Collin Funk <collin.funk1 <at> gmail.com>, 78910 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#78910: tail does not support -r added by POSIX.1-2024
Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2025 10:10:21 +0100

On 27/06/2025 06:36, Collin Funk wrote:
> Creating this bug report since I have not been able to create a working
> implementation yet, and perhaps my looking into this will inspire others
> thoughts...
> 
> POSIX-1.2024 adds the following SYNOPSIS for 'tail' [1]:
> 
>      tail [-f] [-c number|-n number] [file]
>      tail -r [-n number] [file]
> 
> Where the description for '-r' is:
> 
>      Copy the lines in reverse order (last line first). If -n is
>      specified, that many lines of the file, starting with the last line,
>      shall be copied. If -n is not specified, every line of the input
>      file shall be copied.
> 
> In a simple implementation of 'tail', one that allocates an array to
> store each line in memory, this would be easy to implement. However,
> the Coreutils version reads the file in BUFSIZE/getpagesize() chunks
> and then prints, repeating until completed. Therefore, we cannot just
> modify the existing code to swap lines in memory.
> 
> Collin
> 
> [1] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/tail.html

tail -r comes from the BSDs.
Also the BSDs don't have tac(1) which overlaps in functionality quite a bit.
I'm a bit surprised -r was added by POSIX, but fair enough.

Thanks for flagging this.

Padraig

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