Bug 199741

Summary:	tail(1) fails to parse plus-sign argument, reports error
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	David Rabson <tla>
Component:	coreutils	Assignee:	Tim Waugh <twaugh>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	5	CC:	meyering, tla
Target Milestone:	---
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Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Last Closed:	2006-07-24 05:13:49 EDT	Type:	---
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description David Rabson 2006-07-21 13:58:19 EDT

Description of problem:

  tail(1) fails to parse plus-sign argument; reports error

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

  5.93

How reproducible:

  /bin/echo "bad\ngood" | tail +2


should yield "good," instead gives an error message about not finding
a file called "+2".



  
Actual results:
  tail: cannot open `+2' for reading: No such file or directory

  
Expected results:
  good


Additional info:

It's possible this originates in an argument-parsing library.

This is an urgent bug on submitter's system, since it breaks
hundreds of local shell scripts.

Comment 1 David Rabson 2006-07-21 14:03:26 EDT

Correction to procedure to reproduce bug:

/bin/echo -e "bad\ngood" | tail +2


--

Comment 2 Tim Waugh 2006-07-24 05:13:49 EDT

The correct syntax for this is "tail -n +2 f".  You can get the old syntax
(which does not conform to the current POSIX spec) back like this:

export _POSIX2_VERSION=199209

See the info page aobut this:

  info coreutils "Standards Conformance"