Re: Bug in tail program in Fedora Core 6

[Bob Proulx]

Kim wrote:
> It appears as if the tail +n functionality has disappeared. The info
> tail output still states that something like tail +2 should output
> from the second line onwards, as does man tail.

Where does it say that?  What I see is this:

  -n, --lines=N            output the last N lines, instead of the last 10

  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.

Therefore it should be 'tail -n +2'.

> This functionality has been in tail on unixes from days of old (> 20
> years) and I for one have written many scripts that use this, such
> as:
> 
> ls -l | tail +2

This is a change to conform to POSIX.  See the online standards
documentation for more information.

  http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/tail.html

The problem is that files may start with a '+'.  While filenames
starting with a '-' are expected to need special attention filenames
starting with a '+' are not.

In the news entry for release 5.90:

  A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
  being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
  problematic usages.  These include:

    Problematic       Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
       usage            whether you prefer the behavior of:
                      POSIX 1003.2-1992    POSIX 1003.1-2001
    sort +4           sort -k 5            sort ./+4
    tail +4           tail -n +4           tail ./+4
    tail - f          tail f               [see (*) below]
    tail -c 4         tail -c 10 ./4       tail -c4
    touch 12312359 f  touch -t 12312359 f  touch ./12312359 f
    uniq +4           uniq -s 4            uniq ./+4

The coreutils info documentation says:

  The gnu utilities normally conform to the version of POSIX that is
  standard for your system.  To cause them to conform to a different
  version of POSIX, define the _POSIX2_VERSION environment variable to a
  value of the form yyyymm specifying the year and month the standard
  was adopted.  Two values are currently supported for _POSIX2_VERSION:
  199209 stands for POSIX 1003.2-1992, and 200112 stands for POSIX
  1003.1-2001.  For example, if you have a newer system but are running
  software that assumes an older version of POSIX and uses 'sort +1' or
  'tail +10', you can work around any compatibility problems by setting
  _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.

You may specify that you desire POSIX 1003.2-1992 and the tail command
will conform to that version of the standard.

For a single command:

  ls -l | env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 tail +2

But my advice is to note the change and to roll with it.

Bob