Re: POSIX misunderstanding

[Paul Eggert]

Albert Cahalan <address@hidden> writes:

> a POSIX-conforming "head" program may
> support a "-1" option. It may also support a
> "-2" option, and so on.

That violates POSIX Utility Syntax Guidelines 3 and 11.  See:

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/basedefs/xbd_chap12.html#tag_12_02

Most likely the underlying problem is that your distribution has
decided to set _POSIX2_VERSION to 200112 in <unistd.h>.  This
indicates that the distribution's maintainers want conformance to
POSIX 1003.1-2001 as specified above.  To get the older behavior that
you prefer, you can set _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment, or
build coreutils with "configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209".