head

[Julian Wald]

Hi,

I think I've found a small bug in "head". If you issue 

head -n 09 file
head: 09: number of lines is so large that it is not representable

I assume this is an octal conversion bug (ie 09 is not a valid octal
number), but the manual page doesn't mention that octal is a valid
input base for the -n parameter. The problem was discovered by me in a
script that extracted two digits as a file list count (01-99).

The version info is:

head (GNU textutils) 2.0

This behaviour is reproducible under Slackware Linux 8.1 and OpenBSD
3.1 (and presumably anything else using the same version of head)

Best wishes

-Julian