Have you EVER heard of or used the tac command?

[Shea Bennett]

Amazing session for the new Linux+ v.8 (006) exam TTT session today 9/11/2025.

Jason went over the tac command and many other options. I'm not even embarrassed to say I have never used the tac command or searched in files with grep. Excellent and eye opening session. I truly and completely appreciate going back to the roots and fundamentals. One thing I will say about Linux I truly love and enjoy. You never stop learning!

 

[jarrelrivera]

I've never used the tac command. I know it, just never used it.

The common commands I use for viewing the contents of a file are cat, less, more, head, tail, nano and vim. All of the commands I've mentioned are in the exam objectives for Linux+. I'm not sure about tac.

grep is a command that is very common in many of the CompTIA exams whether, it'd be for Linux+, Security+, CySA+, Pentest+ and even SecurityX (formerly CASP+). I personally use grep in many scripts.

aside from grep, I also suggest knowing sed and awk

 

[jasoneckert]

aside from grep, I also suggest knowing sed and awk

There's definitely no shortage of text tools on Linux. Tools like awk, sed, cut, paste, nl, etc. are lumped into next Thursday's TTT on the shell because they are often used alongside redirection, and they’re easier to introduce a bit later in the course, once students have some shell basics under their belt

Although not on Linux+, you can also install the bat command (e.g., dnf install bat), which is a nice alternative to cat/tac and more.

 

[Shea Bennett]

sed, awk have been my nemesis! I'm definitely spending more time on both. The CertMaster+ learning platform is great also! I have been really enjoying these training labs. I was very happy to see Rocky Linux being used!

 

[Wajih]

Honestly, I’ve never really used “tac”, even though I know it exists — probably because I’m not a big fan of “cat” in the first place (sorry, cat lovers).
Instead, I’m more of a “less” person. Why? Because it lets me search, scroll forward, AND go back — basically, it’s like having superpowers in the terminal.
And the best part? “less” sneaks in a bunch of vi-like tricks. So if you’re already comfortable with vi (or vim for the cool kids), you’ll probably join me in the Team Less fan club.

 

[Shea Bennett]

Now, I'm looking up bat commands ROFL

 

[Tess Sluijter]

Instead of `grep` these days I often use `rg` or `ripgrep` which is much better for recursive searches through files and directory trees.