> A lot uglier, but you can do a one liner ... Yeah, but that one-liner reads the whole file. 'tail' can be more clever (and is). 'strace' output: open("a

> A lot uglier, but you can do a one liner ... Yeah, but that one-liner reads the whole file. 'tail' can be more clever (and is). 'strace' output: open("a", O_RDONLY) = 3 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=545975512, ...}) = 0 lseek(3, 0, SEEK_CUR) = 0 lseek(3, 0, SEEK_END) = 545975512 lseek(3, 545972224, SEEK_SET) = 545972224 read(3, "tu 11.04 \\n \\l\n\nUbuntu 11.04 \\n "..., 3288) = 3288 'tail' is seeking to the end, then reading backwards. The point being, these 'little tools' can contain important optimisations - they aren't necessarily equivalent to a naive reimplementation.