[plug] my Linux is too young! Need older "tail" and "head"

[William Kenworthy]

Not true - head and tails use of -1 has recently been deprecated in
favour of the supposedly more standard "-n 1" syntax, generating lots of
error messages in older scripts, creating the effects Denis mentioned. 
It prints a message to the screen when you use the -1 syntax telling you
that its deprecated!

BillK

On Wed, 2004-06-30 at 22:42, Craig Ringer wrote:
> Denis Brown wrote:
> 
> > As an example, an installation programme (shell script) performs a
> > compilation of source code and at the end, examines a log file to see if
> > the last line is a success code or failure.   Something like
> > tail -1 thislog.txt
> 
> That should work fine. 'tail' is a standalone program anyway, not a part 
> of the shell, and it's been consistent for an impressively long time.
>