Re: tail +n does not work under Linux?

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   I have just noticed that 'tail +n' does not seem to work under
   Linux.

Please don't call the GNU system for Linux, Linux is a important part
of the system, but it is not the name of it.  Linux is the kernel of
the GNU system, when people call the whole system for Linux they give
none of the principal developers credit for the work that they have
done.  Please see http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html for more
information.

   For instance:
   $ tail +3 .cshrc
   tail: cannot open `+3' for reading: No such file or directory
   ==> .cshrc <==
   [...]

   I am using coreutils-7.2, and I have just reproduced the issue with 7.3, 
   under Linux RHEL 3 and 4. Curiously, it works OK under Solaris 8.

   ... and tail -3 works.

   Have I misunderstood the doc, or is it a bug?

The documentation said the following, (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 have a
| newer system but are running software that assumes an older version
| of POSIX and uses `sort +1' or `tail +10', you can work around any
| compatibility problems by setting `_POSIX2_VERSION=199209' in your
| environment.