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

Cameron Patrick cameron at patrick.wattle.id.au
Wed Jun 30 22:41:28 WST 2004


Denis Brown wrote:

| I suppose the option I have is to get from somewhere a more forgiving
| (elderly?) tail and head and put them in the path before the system tail
| and head (or symlink to them, etc).   Seems a bit messy to me so I turn
| here for further inspiration :-)

There's something you can do involving setting a POSIXLY_CORRECT
environment variable (and various others) to make some GNU tools act
like older ones.  I'm not sure where this is documented though.

FWIW my head and tail (from coreutils 5.0.91) accept old-style 'head -1' 
usage just fine.

Cameron.




More information about the plug mailing list