On Wed, 11 Nov 2009, נחשון ישורון/Nachshon Yeshurun wrote:
Man pages for the tail command shows the ability to use the +N option.
Yet, attempting it on Ubuntu 9.10 results in an error.
Is this a bug?
Not a bug.
From man pages:
-n, --lines=N
output the last N lines, instead of the last 10; or use +N to
output lines starting with the Nth
Attempting the command:
nachs...@nachshon-ubuntu-vm:~/temp$ tail +5 /etc/passwd
tail: cannot open `+5' for reading: No such file or directory
The manpage syntax should be read as
$ tail -n +5
or
$ tail --lines=+5
Regarding the bare "tail +5" and the issues surrounding this usage
please see:
http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/faq/coreutils-faq.html#Old-tail-plus-N-syntax-now-fails
Cheers,
Phil
