Re: Some question regarding tail and option "-c"

[Robert Milasan]

On Wed, 03 Oct 2012 20:09:26 +0200
"Jim Meyering" <address@hidden> wrote:

> There is some documentation on the effects of that variable
> in "info coreutils":
> 
>     2.13 Standards conformance
>     ==========================
> 
>     In a few cases, the GNU utilities' default behavior is
> incompatible with the POSIX standard.  To suppress these
> incompatibilities, define the `POSIXLY_CORRECT' environment
> variable.  Unless you are checking for POSIX conformance, you
> probably do not need to define `POSIXLY_CORRECT'.
> 
>        Newer versions of POSIX are occasionally incompatible with
> older versions.  For example, older versions of POSIX required the
> command `sort +1' to sort based on the second and succeeding fields
> in each input line, but starting with POSIX 1003.1-2001 the same
> command is required to sort the file named `+1', and you must instead
> use the command `sort -k 2' to get the field-based sort.
> 
>        The GNU utilities normally conform to the version of POSIX
> that is standard for your system.  To cause them to conform to a
> different version of POSIX, define the `_POSIX2_VERSION' environment
> variable to a value of the form YYYYMM specifying the year and month
> the standard was adopted.  Three values are currently supported for
>     `_POSIX2_VERSION': `199209' stands for POSIX 1003.2-1992, `200112'
>     stands for POSIX 1003.1-2001, and `200809' stands for POSIX
> 1003.1-2008. For example, if you have a newer system but are running
> software that assumes an older version of POSIX and uses `sort +1' or
> `tail +10', you can work around any compatibility problems by setting
>     `_POSIX2_VERSION=199209' in your environment.
> 

This doesn't make sense, I can reproduce this on openSUSE 12.1 and 12.2
with coreutils 8.14 and 8.16.
I don't think we are using some old POSIX standard.

-- 
Robert Milasan

L3 Support Engineer
SUSE Linux
email: address@hidden
GPG fingerprint: B6FE F4A8 0FA3 3040 3402  6FE7 2F64 167C 1909 6D1A