[plug] Posix, Fedora 5 and tail

[Carl Gherardi]

Hey All,

I'm sure most of you will strike this pretty soon, but discovered a
change in behavior on Fedora 5 that broke a few of my scripts.

# tail +5 filename
tail: cannot open `+5' for reading: No such file or directory

After a hunt around bugzilla it lead me to this:

"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."

# export _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 && tail +5 filename

Works as  it used to.

Cheers

Carl G