Michael Stone wrote: > On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 05:24:06PM -0700, you wrote: >> $ seq 1 10 | tail +5 >> tail: cannot open `+5' for reading: No such file or directory > > Yeah, it's intentional (see changelog). I don't intend for this version > to enter testing yet, so people reading this please don't be tempted to > close or downgrade the bug.
I had already seen the changelog entry. I reopened the bug to request that this syntax continue to work. How often do people tail files named with a plus sign follwed by a number (and can't just use tail ./+NUM or tail -- +NUM), versus how many people have tail +NUM burned into finger memory? The same applies to sort +NUM. Furthermore, third-party software will likely still rely on this for quite some time to come. I do agree that packages should get fixed to avoid this issue by using tail -n +NUM and sort -k NUM+1, and all the packages in Debian may even have these fixes in place already (though it looks like they don't; see 368909 for an example regarding usage of sort +NUM in cvs), but changing tail and sort to no longer support this behavior for interactive use or third-party software violates user expectations in a big way. If you *do* decide to go this route, then at a minimum this change needs: * An entry in debian/NEWS.Debian.gz , including an explanation of the environment variable setting (_POSIX2_VERSION=199209) needed to get the previous behavior, and a pointer to 'info coreutils "Standards conformance"', * A note in the tail and sort manpages, including the same explanation and pointer, * A mail to various appropriate places, including debian-user, debian-devel-announce, and anywhere else that seems appropriate, and * An extremely good justification for why we should break this syntax, and what it gains us to do so. "Precisely conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001" by itself may or may not qualify. This justification should get included in all three of the above. - Josh Triplett
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