Patrick West wrote: > I downloaded the latest and greatest core utilities. The first problem I > found is that head is not backward compatible.
The latest and greatest coreutils version is coreutils-6.9. Is that the version to which you are referring? If it is not then please report the version that you are using. Or even better please do try the latest version. GNU Coreutils version 6.9 was released as stable March 22, 2007. > head -1 <file> no longer works, but a great many scripts still rely on this > api. Is there a way to tell it to accept this command without downloading > the source and changing it myself? Previously the -NUM option syntax had been suppressed as part of a move for improved standards conformance. But the NEWS entry for coreutils-5.90 dated 2005-09-29 says: Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. This leads me to believe that you are actually not using the latest and greatest version by a couple of years. :-) Bob _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
