Re: tail broken on fedora core 5

[Eric Blake]

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According to Bob Kaehms on 9/5/2006 2:34 PM:
> You guys probably already know, but the +n option no longer works in FC5.
> Not sure if this is a Fedora issue, or a gnu issue, but thought I'd pass it
> along.

This is documented in NEWS, ever since coreutils 5.90:

** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
  conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001.  The following changes apply only
  when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
  conforming to older POSIX versions.

  The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:

    tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]

  A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
  being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
  problematic usages.  These include:

    Problematic       Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
       usage            whether you prefer the behavior of:
                      POSIX 1003.2-1992    POSIX 1003.1-2001
    tail +4           tail -n +4           tail ./+4
    tail - f          tail f               [see (*) below]
    tail -c 4         tail -c 10 ./4       tail -c4

    (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
    standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".


Also, read 'info coreutils Standards' for how to set the environment
variable _POSIX2_VERSION to choose which behavior you get.

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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