CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxreversefile-manipulation
Thangam
Thangam

Reputation: 169

find and reverse text in multiple files with tac command in linux

I am trying to reverse the order of multiple text files (for plotting purposes) which are essentially rows of numbers. I tried to do it with tac and combined it with find and -exec as

find ./dir1/dir2/ -name foo.txt -type f -exec tac {} \;

but this only gives the output on the screen and does not modify the files intended.

Am I missing something here?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 465

Answers (1)

Anders R. Bystrup
Anders R. Bystrup

Reputation: 16060

You're almost there - tac writes to stdout so you can simply redirect the output somewhere handy:

find .... \; > newfoo.txt

If you want each file reversed and written to the same location, something like this will do:

find . -type f -exec sh -c 'tac "$1" > "$1"-new' -- {} \;

Cheers,

Upvotes: 2

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