Как видно из исходного кода , строка 525,вы можете увидеть комментарии к реализации.
/* Print the last N_LINES lines from the end of file FD.
Go backward through the file, reading 'BUFSIZ' bytes at a time (except
probably the first), until we hit the start of the file or have
read NUMBER newlines.
START_POS is the starting position of the read pointer for the file
associated with FD (may be nonzero).
END_POS is the file offset of EOF (one larger than offset of last byte).
Return true if successful. */