Tail not accepting -c 123 anymore?

[Mike Hearn]

Hi,

In coreutils 5.3.0 tail happily accepted the -c switch with a space
between the switch and the number. However in the new SuSE beta it does
not unless you set _POSIX2_VERSION. Is this a change in coreutils CVS or
something Novell have done? 

It isn't backwards compatible and has broken various shell scripts,
which is why I want to find out the root cause of this problem and fix
it. This sort of change really needs to be a POSIXLY_CORRECT type thing,
I think.

thanks -mike