Re: Tail not accepting -c 123 anymore?

[Mike Hearn]

On Sat, 2005-03-26 at 21:43 -0800, Paul Eggert wrote:
> This change is required for conformance to SUSv2
> <http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcu/tail.html> which
> says that "tail -c" must be treated like "tail -c 10"; hence "tail -c
> 123" must be treated like "tail -c 10 123", which causes the behavior
> you're observing.  (This is how "tail" behaved in Unix Version 7,
> circa 1978, so we're talking _real_ backward compatibility here.  :-)

That sounds like the one, yes. Though 5.3.0 doesn't seem to show it.

I can't help but wonder why compatibility with standards from 1978 is
considered more important than compatibility with GNU from last year
given how many shell scripts have survived from 1978 and how many are
around from more recent times.

Unfortunately setting _POSIX2_VERSION doesn't help me. The errant
command is inside the stub code of a generic installer builder which is
widely distributed. When this change rolls out, they'll all break and
you are saying I will have no option but to get everybody distributing
installers built with this program to upgrade to the new version and
rebuild their installers :(

thanks -mike