Bug 129388
| Summary: | tail ignores options when -n or +n is specified, head demands a certain parameter order | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 | Reporter: | Paul Moore <pmoore> |
| Component: | coreutils | Assignee: | Tim Waugh <twaugh> |
| Status: | CLOSED NOTABUG | QA Contact: | |
| Severity: | high | Docs Contact: | |
| Priority: | medium | ||
| Version: | 3.0 | CC: | pmoore, redhat-bugzilla, ronrotach |
| Target Milestone: | --- | ||
| Target Release: | --- | ||
| Hardware: | i386 | ||
| OS: | Linux | ||
| Whiteboard: | |||
| Fixed In Version: | Doc Type: | Bug Fix | |
| Doc Text: | Story Points: | --- | |
| Clone Of: | Environment: | ||
| Last Closed: | 2004-08-10 12:09:56 UTC | Type: | --- |
| Regression: | --- | Mount Type: | --- |
| Documentation: | --- | CRM: | |
| Verified Versions: | Category: | --- | |
| oVirt Team: | --- | RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host: | |
| Cloudforms Team: | --- | Target Upstream Version: | |
| Embargoed: | |||
head seems to have a similar problem: head -2 -q /tmp/a /tmp/b a b d e head -q -2 /tmp/a /tmp/b head: invalid option -- 2 Try `head --help' for more information. Options should be accepted in either order. Severity changed to high because this has the potential to break numerous shell scripts. The shell scripts should use "-n 2" instead of "-2". This (POSIX) way
of specifying the option will work in both older and newer versions of
head/tail.
The documentation ('info coreutils head') documents the restriction
you note on option ordering:
On older systems, `head' supports an obsolete option
`-COUNTOPTIONS', which is recognized only if it is specified first.
COUNT is a decimal number optionally followed by a size letter (`b',
`k', `m') as in `-c', or `l' to mean count by lines, or other option
letters (`cqv'). POSIX 1003.1-2001 (*note Standards conformance::)
does not allow this; use `-c COUNT' or `-n COUNT' instead.
*** Bug 134139 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. *** |
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4.2) Gecko/20040301 Description of problem: If tail is given a +n or -n (where n is a number), the other valid options like -q, --quiet, -v, --verbose, do not work. Tail appears to accept only one parameter is +n or -n is specified, which makes it impossible for shell scripts to tail numerous files without pretty details about the file the data came from. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): coreutils-4.5.3-26 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. echo -e 'a\nb\nc' > /tmp/a ; echo -e 'd\ne\nf' > /tmp/b 2. tail -2 /tmp/a /tmp/b # WORKS 3. tail -2 -q /tmp/a /tmp/b # FAILS Actual Results: tail: -q: No such file or directory Expected Results: b c e f Additional info: Also occurs when specifying the +n option. Also occurs when using --quiet instead of -q Also occurs when using -v and --verbose Also occurs when changing order of [+-]n and -option.