I'm on the austin-group mailing list, which is the discussion list for the POSIX committee.
According to discussion on the austin-group mailing list, the POSIX spec never intended to disallow the traditional syntax. Very rarely is traditional syntax disallowed, and only with some major justification. Normally I'd say the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable would be useful, but this isn't even a correct interpretation of POSIX! As for Solaris, /usr/xpg4/bin is not normally used. Sun put it there as a checkbox item. It's about as relevant as the POSIX subsystem provided with Windows. Then again, that points to a solution. If the Solaris way is any example to be used, then we can do likewise. Install the defective "tail" and "head" in /usr/xpg4/bin where it won't bother anybody. SGI tends to require that an environment variable _XPG be set to a positive integer. (not sure on this specific issue) Setting UNIX95 to 1 (as HP sometimes uses) is OK too. The "invalid suffix character in obsolescent option" message from "tail ++foo" is crap. If the "+" is followed by a non-digit, then obviously the tradtitional syntax is not being used. I sure hope "tail -6 foo" and "head -6 foo" are not also getting hit by this. Last I argued with upstream, they were. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
