From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051118 Fedora/1.5-0.5.0.rc3 Firefox/1.5 Description of problem: The use of a command such as tail +2 file has been a standard part of UNIX from before I graduated (1988!) This is the first time I have ever see the above option report... tail: cannot open `+2' for reading: No such file or directory This is not good, I know of hundreds, if not thousands of UNXI shells scripts that rely on tail +2 printing a file from the second line onward. EG: from the FC5 manual... If the first character of N (the number of bytes or lines) is a â+â, print beginning with the Nth item from the start of each file This includes the use of just + instead of -+2 which also failes to work! Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): coreutils-5.93-2 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. tail +2 .xsession-errors 2. 3. Actual Results: tail: cannot open `+2' for reading: No such file or directory followed by a filename header, and the last ten lines of the file! Expected Results: no header (only one filename given. all the lines of the file except the first (eg line N onward) Additional info: The use of +N as a option for tail has been present since the 1970's! It must be provided for compatability. This could cause sever problems as it impairs the working of existing shell scripts.
Use 'tail -n +2'. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 174624 ***