in reply to Reversing (the) reading of a file.

While its a fun and educational thing to roll your own (I did it myself in a perl version of tac here), someone's already done that and put it in a module called File::ReadBackwards.

Oh yeah, and then there's the classic print reverse <> which slurps in the whole file and so is not recommended for large files (and which my tac defaults to on non-seekable filehandles but File::ReadBackwards does not).