Re: grep: default file if -r is used

[Charlie Gordon]

> Recently I found that "head -1" and friends began not to work, even though
> I didn't upgrade coreutils. I had only upgraded glibc a few weeks ago and
> then later I recompiled coreutils with the new glibc headers which caused
> the change. It's okay that "head -1" hasn't been documented for years, but
> in the mean time no runtime warning was issued to give people time to fix
> their old scripts, it just suddenly didn't work. (Background story: we're
> building a hungarian linux distribution, compiling approx. 1000 source
> packages...) We patched coreutils to emit a warning only, but there are I
> guess 30, 40, maybe 50 packages which would not compile or not run
> properly as they use "tail -1" or "sort +4" etc somewhere.
>

I strongly agree with this.  POSIX positively sucks for banning direct
numeric flags that are so easy to use and remember.  I know they have been
deprecated for some time, but no stderr warnings have been issued by the
likes of tail and head before dropping support altogether.  I have even
added some on my own systems, such as "du -1" for "du --max-depth=1"

I cannot even remember what was the main reason for this anyway...

Chqrlie