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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  ‘+’,
       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.