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Bug 458827

Summary:	tail command under 5.2 cannot handle + option
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5	Reporter:	jas
Component:	coreutils	Assignee:	Ondrej Vasik <ovasik>
Status:	CLOSED DUPLICATE	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	5.2
Target Milestone:	rc
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2008-08-13 08:06:06 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:

Description jas 2008-08-12 15:19:08 UTC

Description of problem:

Under Redhat Enterprise 4.X, the tail command would accept the "+numlines" argument.  On 5.2, it does not. 


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

tail under 4.6 is based on coreutils 5.2.1
tail under 5.2 is based on coreutils 5.97

How reproducible:

tail +2

Actual results:

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

Expected results:

lines 2+ of file 

Note: tail -n +2 works, but "tail -2" still works (to give the last 2 lines of the file)... either tail should enforce the fact that -n needs to always be used, and hence "-2" shouldn't work, or if -2 works without -n, +2 should work as well.

Comment 1 Ondrej Vasik 2008-08-13 08:06:06 UTC

Thanks for report. It is not a bug and it was already reported few times. This behaviour is required by latest version of POSIX - which is used by coreutils-5.97 (used by RHEL-5) and later. This is documented in NEWS and coreutils info documentation. As it was reported few times, I agreed to add the description of the behaviour to tail manpages in RHEL 5.3 update. Marking that bug DUPLICATE of #287751 , see that bugzilla for possible workarounds (changing _POSIX2_VERSION to 199209 will make tail working as in RHEL-4).

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 287751 ***