George Fletcher wrote:
> Gold ol' Linux, bad ol' Posix. This time FC5 has broken my shell
> scripts by redefining the flags for the 'tail' command. Most notably,
> by deleting the second most used flag '+#', used to concatenate a file
> beginning at line #.


I have just checked on both suse and mandriva and the +nnnn switch is
still supported as I would expect. I agree with you, if RedHat have
done this, then it is extremely silly indeed, and seems vaguely
pointless. It would appear, however, that combining -n and +777 will
work. That is what the strict interpretation of the latest posix
standard requires. Naked numbers cannot be passed as parameters.

Try setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 at the top of your scripts, and see
if that makes a difference.

The good news is, of course, open source. It should be possible to get
hold of the source and compile it yourself. Or write something in perl
to do the same thing.