tail question

[Warren L Dodge]

I built coreutils-5.0 on solaris 2.51, solaris 8, and linux

On the two solaris systems the following command works.

tail -1 file

On linux is complains and says to use

tail -n 1 file

"head" has the same issue. 

Any idea what caused this?

As we work in a multi-platform environment it is important to remain
compatible with the Solaris utilities. 

If there are other areas of change I'd sure like to know.

Thanks