bug found in head

[Nik Reiman]

Hello,
I think I found a bug in the GNU head, from textutils version 2.0.
For some reason, head has trouble parsing numbers with a leading 0;
and primarily the numbers "08" and "09".  For instance:

$ for x in `seq -f '%02g' 1 10` ; \
> do cat /etc/passwd | head -n $x | tail -n 1 ; \
> done
root:x:0:0::/root:/bin/bash
bin:x:1:1:bin:/bin:
daemon:x:2:2:daemon:/sbin:
adm:x:3:4:adm:/var/log:
lp:x:4:7:lp:/var/spool/lpd:
sync:x:5:0:sync:/sbin:/bin/sync
shutdown:x:6:0:shutdown:/sbin:/sbin/shutdown
head: 08: number of lines is so large that it is not representable
head: 09: number of lines is so large that it is not representable
news:x:9:13:news:/usr/lib/news:

I have replicated this bug on x86 linux and little-endian MIPS linux.

Thanks,
Nik

-- 
Nik Reiman // address@hidden \\ http://www.aboleo.net