Re: tail question

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

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

You could set _POSIX2_VERSION on the GNU/Linux system to 199209.  From
(coreutils)Standards conformance

    In a few cases, the GNU utilities' default behavior is
 incompatible with the POSIX standard.  To suppress these
 incompatibilities, define the `POSIXLY_CORRECT' environment variable.
 Unless you are checking for POSIX conformance, you probably do not
 need to define `POSIXLY_CORRECT'.

    Newer versions of POSIX are occasionally incompatible with older
 versions.  For example, older versions of POSIX required the command
 `sort +1' to sort based on the second and succeeding fields in each
 input line, but starting with POSIX 1003.1-2001 the same command is
 required to sort the file named `+1', and you must instead use the
 command `sort -k 2' to get the field-based sort.

    The GNU utilities normally conform to the version of POSIX that is
 standard for your system.  To cause them to conform to a different
 version of POSIX, define the `_POSIX2_VERSION' environment variable
 to a value of the form YYYYMM specifying the year and month the
 standard was adopted.  Two values are currently supported for
 `_POSIX2_VERSION': `199209' stands for POSIX 1003.2-1992, and
 `200112' stands for POSIX 1003.1-2001.  For example, if you are
 running older software that assumes an older version of POSIX and
 uses `sort +1', you can work around the compatibility problems by
 setting `_POSIX2_VERSION=199209' in your environment.

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

See the NEWS file; all user-visible changes are noted there.