Re: Coretutils tail command no longer correctly accepting +2 as a parameter

[mwoehlke]

Eric Blake wrote:
> According to Bruce Baxter on 9/14/2006 10:42 PM:
> > The GNU coreutils version 5.97 (included with Fedora Core 5 in RPM
> > coreutils-5.97-1.2) returns an error, for example:
> >
> >      tail: cannot open `+2' for reading: No such file or directory
>
> This is not a bug in coreutils, but a consequence of your choice
> (inherited from Fedora Core 5's choice) of POSIX compliance.  This is
> becoming a FAQ; see my reply on this same subject from last week:
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2006-09/msg00035.html

Just for the record, I was hit with this too; when I built 5.97 across 
our supported platforms (about nine combinations of hardware and OS), a 
script using the old '-#'/'+#' syntax broke. I added '-n' to it, but 
that in turn caused it to break with several non-GNU versions of 
head/tail that don't recognize '-n'; IOW, it broke compatibility with 
non-GNU versions of these utilities.

I haven't re-tested with 6.x, but for now what I've been doing is 
sticking with '-n' and requiring this particular script to use GNU 
head/tail. After all, it's *SO* much easier to write "portable" scripts 
when all the platforms you run the script on have not only the same GNU 
toolchain, but the same *versions* of GNU tools :-).

--
Matthew
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