How to read a file in reverse order?

Question

How to read a file in reverse order using python? I want to read a file from last line to first line.

Answer 1

Here you can find my my implementation, you can limit the ram usage by changing the "buffer" variable, there is a bug that the program prints an empty line in the beginning.

And also ram usage may be increase if there is no new lines for more than buffer bytes, "leak" variable will increase until seeing a new line ("\n").

This is also working for 16 GB files which is bigger then my total memory.

import os,sys
buffer = 1024*1024 # 1MB
f = open(sys.argv[1])
f.seek(0, os.SEEK_END)
filesize = f.tell()

division, remainder = divmod(filesize, buffer)
line_leak=''

for chunk_counter in range(1,division + 2):
    if division - chunk_counter < 0:
        f.seek(0, os.SEEK_SET)
        chunk = f.read(remainder)
    elif division - chunk_counter >= 0:
        f.seek(-(buffer*chunk_counter), os.SEEK_END)
        chunk = f.read(buffer)

    chunk_lines_reversed = list(reversed(chunk.split('\n')))
    if line_leak: # add line_leak from previous chunk to beginning
        chunk_lines_reversed[0] += line_leak

    # after reversed, save the leakedline for next chunk iteration
    line_leak = chunk_lines_reversed.pop()

    if chunk_lines_reversed:
        print "\n".join(chunk_lines_reversed)
    # print the last leaked line
    if division - chunk_counter < 0:
        print line_leak