Re: tail +3 stopped working

[Eric Blake]

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According to Marvin Simkin on 3/30/2007 4:22 PM:
> $ tail --version
> tail (GNU coreutils) 5.97

You are still due for an upgrade.  The latest stable version is 6.9.

At any rate, this is not a bug, but a POSIX conformance issue; and it was
documented in the NEWS for 5.90:

  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

and it is also mentioned in the manual (info coreutils tail), along with
the _POSIX2_VERSION environment variable which you can set to choose which
version of POSIX you want to obey.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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