Java : Read last n lines of a HUGE file

Question

I want to read the last n lines of a very big file without reading the whole file into any buffer/memory area using Java.

I looked around the JDK APIs and Apache Commons I/O and am not able to locate one which is suitable for this purpose.

I was thinking of the way tail or less does it in UNIX. I don't think they load the entire file and then show the last few lines of the file. There should be similar way to do the same in Java too.

Answer 1

I found it the simplest way to do by using ReversedLinesFileReader from apache commons-io api. This method will give you the line from bottom to top of a file and you can specify n_lines value to specify the number of line.

import org.apache.commons.io.input.ReversedLinesFileReader;


File file = new File("D:\\file_name.xml");
int n_lines = 10;
int counter = 0; 
ReversedLinesFileReader object = new ReversedLinesFileReader(file);
while(counter < n_lines) {
    System.out.println(object.readLine());
    counter++;
}