Reverse the order of lines in a file

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Reading and writing to the same file can in theory cause it to become truncated or corrupted so you can use sponge from moreutils to “soak up std out and write to a file” which ensures that the file is processed in entirety before redirecting the output back to the same file.

tail -r file.txt | sponge file.txt

Utils on slightlymore

Reverse the order of lines in a file