robertharvey@my-deja.com wrote:
> 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.
>
With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, the man page says, in part,

"If the first character of N (the number of bytes or lines) is a `+',
print beginning with the Nth item from the start of each file,
otherwise, print the last N items in the file. N may have a multiplier
suffix: b for 512, k for 1024, m for 1048576 (1 Meg)."

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (actually, CentOS 4), tha manual page says,
in part,

"If the first character of N (the number of bytes or lines) is a '+',
print beginning with the Nth item from the start of each file,
otherwise, print the last N items in the file. N may have a multi-
plier suffix: b 512, k 1024, m 1024*1024."



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