Re: bug in tail

[Jim Meyering]

"Thomas Heine" <address@hidden> wrote:
> contrary to documentation and old versions the following commands
> don't work any longer for new versions of tail, as present in newer
> versions of Debian and Novell linux:
>
> tail -1 *.inp (*.inp gives a list of some files) gives an error (tail:
> invalid option -- 1).
...

Thanks for the report, but this aspect of tail depends on the
version of tail you're using and possibly on your environment settings.
Using the latest (coreutils-6.9) version, with no setting for
_POSIX2_VERSION in your environment, it should work just fine:

  $ env -u _POSIX2_VERSION -- /usr/bin/tail -1 /etc/issue
  $ tail --version|head -n1
  tail (GNU coreutils) 6.9