Paul, Thank you for the information. Would you consider updating the builtin documentation and man page to match the behavior of the program?
Also, do you know of an efficient POSIX way to filter out the first N lines of a text file? # inefficient? head -N datafile > datafile.head diff datafile.head datafile |grep '^>' |cut -c3- > datafile.new mv datafile.new datafile Thanks, Forest --- On Mon, 7/12/10, Paul Eggert <[email protected]> wrote: From: Paul Eggert <[email protected]> Subject: Re: bug#6605: +N lines broken with /usr/bin/tail (GNU coreutils) 7.4 To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Date: Monday, July 12, 2010, 2:46 PM On 07/10/10 12:53, Davide Brini wrote: > The "tail +2" syntax is obsolete; probably the recent versions of coreutils > (which 7.4 is not, anyway) dropped support for it. It's not just obsolete: it's incompatible with POSIX 1003.1-2001, which is why it was dropped a while ago. You can bring back support for "tail +2" by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment; this is documented in the coreutils manual. But it's probably better to update those dusty old shell scripts to use the POSIX-specified syntax.
