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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 #.

Are there any systems administrators of more than 19 years old who work
a Redhat or on Posix braindead "specifications"?

George

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 #.
>
> Are there any systems administrators of more than 19 years old who work
> a Redhat or on Posix braindead "specifications"?

IMHO.. no. Red Hat doesn't believe that Unix compatibility is
important.

SUSE on the other hand... (if you have to use Linux)...

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 #.
>
> Are there any systems administrators of more than 19 years old who work
> a Redhat or on Posix braindead "specifications"?

Not sure about their ages. However, SUSE still believes in
having Unix compatibility. If you need Linux, you can give
it a try instead of Red Hat.

["Followup-To:" header set to comp.os.linux.misc.]
On 2006-08-24, 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 #.

Perhaps it's "FC5" that sucks, and not "Linux"?

You'd think someone who posts to Usenet using tin would know the
difference. Hell, you'd wonder why someone like that would be using FC
in the first place.


--
"Ubuntu" - an African word meaning "Slackware is too hard for me".

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.

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."



--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
/V\ PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 06:40:01 up 10 days, 15:48, 5 users, load average: 4.25, 4.24, 4.14

George Fletcher <geflet@not-for-mail.net> 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 #.

Is there anything preventing you from replacing that tail(1) with one that
works for you? At work, I have to live with RedHat, while my operating system
of choice is FreeBSD and the Linux I consider the least annoying is Slackware
(busybox doesn't really count). It took me a while to make RedHat mostly
behaved but since I've got it set up the way I want to, I've found more useful
things to complain about.

Thank $deity for POSIX! It means I can run all the software I run on other
Unixes on Linux too - no matter how hard "distribution X" tries to make it for
me.

See my blog rant on the topic:

<http://www.paeps.cx/weblog/2006/Jan/03/>

> Are there any systems administrators of more than 19 years old who work a
> Redhat or on Posix braindead "specifications"?

I'm sure there are.

- Philip

--
Philip Paeps Please don't email any replies
philip@paeps.cx I follow the newsgroup.

Don't ask the barber if you need a haircut.

On Wednesday 23 August 2006 21:46 a poster that claims to be Chris Cox 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 #.
>>
>> Are there any systems administrators of more than 19 years old who work
>> a Redhat or on Posix braindead "specifications"?
>
> IMHO.. no. Red Hat doesn't believe that Unix compatibility is
> important.
>
> SUSE on the other hand... (if you have to use Linux)...

I love SUSE, except it not being good for musician type work.

I created a Debian partition with Agnula on hdb3. I chose ReiserFS like I
also have with my main SUSE partition, hdb2. (Hdb1 is the swap area.) I can
see the drive in SUSE but can't mount it. . . so far.
--
Regards,
TimeTraveler

One good thing about music,
when it hits you, you feel no pain.
- Bob Marley

In comp.os.linux.misc Philip Paeps <philip+usenet@paeps.cx> wrote:
: of choice is FreeBSD and the Linux I consider the least annoying is Slackware
: (busybox doesn't really count). It took me a while to make RedHat mostly
: behaved but since I've got it set up the way I want to, I've found more useful
: things to complain about.

: Thank $deity for POSIX! It means I can run all the software I run on other
: Unixes on Linux too - no matter how hard "distribution X" tries to make it for
: me.

umm- last I heard Linux isn't Posix compliant. Unless this has changed
recently what you describe isn't going to fly.

Stan

--
Stan Bischof ("stan" at the below domain)
www.worldbadminton.com

On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 22:18:36 +0000, stan wrote:

> In comp.os.linux.misc Philip Paeps <philip+usenet@paeps.cx> wrote:
> : of choice is FreeBSD and the Linux I consider the least annoying is Slackware
> : (busybox doesn't really count). It took me a while to make RedHat mostly
> : behaved but since I've got it set up the way I want to, I've found more useful
> : things to complain about.
>
> : Thank $deity for POSIX! It means I can run all the software I run on other
> : Unixes on Linux too - no matter how hard "distribution X" tries to make it for
> : me.
>
> umm- last I heard Linux isn't Posix compliant. Unless this has changed
> recently what you describe isn't going to fly.

Linux has always been POSIX compliant.

--
The USA Patriot Act is the most unpatriotic act in American history.
Feingold-Obama '08 - Because the Constitution isn't history,
It's the law.