Reverse order of lines

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Tip 29 Printable Monobook Previous Next

created March 7, 2001 · complexity intermediate · author slimzhao · version 5.7

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This command will reverse all lines in the current buffer:

:g/^/m0

1. : start command-line mode.

2. g means you'll take an action through the whole file, generally perform a search.

3. / begins the regular expression.

4. ^ matches the start of a line.

5. the second / ends the regular expression; the rest is an Ex command.

6. m means move (t for copy, d for delete).

7. 0 is the destination line (beginning of buffer).

You can use

:g/regexp/t$

to filter all lines and pick the match line together and copy them to the end of the buffer or

:g/regexp/y A

to put them into a register.

Comments

You can drop the '^' in the regexp, an empty regexp it will match any line, too:

:g//m0

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Not correct - an empty regex just matches the same thing as the previous regex, which will not necessarily match all lines.

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A more intuitive solution is to use the unix "tac" utility, e.g. to reverse the entire file

:%!tac

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Here is how to reverse lines 100-150:

:100-150 g/^/m99

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