"man tail" on my ubuntu box says to report bugs to this address.
Since head and tail have similar functionality, they should respond to similar command line arguments in similar ways except that one command does the head of the file and one does the tail. Specifically, 'man head' says that either "-n -1" or "--lines=-1" would print all lines of the file except the last line. (And, indeed, this works.) So, we would expect that 'tail -n -1 filename' would print all but the first line. In actual practice, the man page suggests that you cannot specify a negative number, and the command prints out the last line of the file. Ideally 'tail -n -1' should print out the first line of the file and the man page should be updated. Alternatively, one could modify 'tail' to generate an error when a negative value is specified. [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ cat << END >/tmp/afile
a b c END
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ head -n -1 /tmp/afile a b [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ tail -n -1 /tmp/afile c [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ tail --version tail (GNU coreutils) 5.93 Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software. You may redistribute copies of it under the terms of the GNU General Public License <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. Written by Paul Rubin, David MacKenzie, Ian Lance Taylor, and Jim Meyering. Cheers, Chuck _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
