On 07.05.2009 19:49, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
Christophe LYON wrote:
I am using coreutils-7.2, and I have just reproduced the issue with
7.3, under Linux RHEL 3 and 4.
Also with Fedora 10's 6.12 package. The behavior change I think may
have been in 6.0 (it is probably in the changelog).
I do remember that change, but I also thought that it had been
reverted a few releases later.
-<number> seems to work presently, +<number> doesn't.
This seems inconsistent to me. Am I the only one? :-)
Curiously, it works OK under Solaris 8.
Are you talking about GNU coreutils here, or the Solaris tail? If the
behavior is different for GNU coreutils, that is probably a bug.
Yes, GNU coreutils built under Solaris.
Hmm. That sounds suspiciously like a bug, then. I don't think the
behavior should be different across platforms. (Time for one of the
maintainers to chime in...)
Well, I have re-read and tried doc kindly carbon-copied by A.Szmidt, and
it seems that under Solaris coreutils default to an older POSIX version
than under Linux.
But I still don't know how to know that at runtime. For instance 'tail
--version' does not mention anything about that. It's probably not the
right place to report, but I think there should be a most obvious way
for the end-user to realize this issue.
But 'man tail' says:
-n, --lines=N
output the last N lines, instead of the last 10; or use
+N to output lines starting with the Nth
does it mean that '-n' is mandatory before a number? I interpreted it
as '-number'.
I read it as, yes, -n is still required (but agree it isn't as clear as
it might be), especially given the blurb in the info doc. IOW I read
'+N' as replacing 'N', not as replacing '-n N' or '--lines=N'.
My understanding of this man fragment is that:
'-n 3' is equivalent to '--lines=3', and one can replace '3' by '+3'.
But I still don't see where '-3' is documented?
As mentioned earlier, at release 6.0 (approx), using '-3' stopped
working. I remember I read the coretuils standard conformance doc at
that time to understand the issue, and started modifying my scripts to
use '-n 3' instead. Any a few coreutils releases later, I noticed '-3'
worked again, but I guess I never understood why. So, I still don't :-)
Christophe.
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