On 08/24/11 23:15, Eli the Beareded wrote: > On any other system I have used the -NUM option can be used with > the -f option to specify how many lines of the file as-is to print > before starting to follow it for updates.
The interaction between -NUM and other options is so complicated and unportable (different editions of the POSIX standards disagree!) that GNU 'tail' is fairly conservative about where it allows -NUM. It might be nice to add support for your particular usage, if someone wants to write the code, but it'll require some care to make sure it doesn't run afoul of existing usage or standard in some other way. In the meantime I suggest using "tail -f -n NUM", as that's standard and portable these days.
