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    Facepalm! Once you look at it the right way, it is so obvious. Commented Jul 23 at 9:36
  • Notice that Stephen's command also introduces printf instead of echo. In this case I guess it's just prevent the newline that echo outputs at the end and is equivalent to echo -n. (I.e echo -n 'A B C D E F ' | tac -s ' '; echo would also have worked) Commented Jul 23 at 11:30
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    @Henriksupportsthecommunity your guess is correct — as mentioned just above the command, it’s to “ensure the initial output contains a space instead of a newline” ;-). See Why is printf better than echo? for why I use printf instead of echo -n. Commented Jul 23 at 11:48