The '+' option appears not to be working as documented. From the man page: "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." I recall this working in previous versions. Output below.
~$ uname -a Linux xxxx 2.6.28-15-generic #49-Ubuntu SMP Tue Aug 18 18:40:08 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux ~$ tail --version tail (GNU coreutils) 6.10 Copyright (C) 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html > This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. Written by Paul Rubin, David MacKenzie, Ian Lance Taylor, and Jim Meyering. ~$ cat testfile.txt a b c d ~$ tail +2 testfile.txt tail: cannot open `+2' for reading: No such file or directory ==> testfile.txt <== a b c d
