Thursday, May 8, 2008

Reverse Lines in a File

You can quickly reverse all lines in a file using the following ex command.

:g/^/m0

This is particularly useful for files that are in chronological order such as logs or email mbox files. Thanks to Skyler for submitting the tip.

2 comments:

graywh said...

Or you could filter the file through "tac" (the opposite of "cat") by :%!tac.

This assumes you have the GNU coreutils on your path. Windows users will need Cygwin or something comparable.

Anonymous said...

Great tip. Now if only I could remember it, rather than visiting this site once a month.