Updated to coreutils-5.20 today as in the latest portage tree. Since then some of my scripts from a 3rd party app are failing. I tracked this down to tail: greebo src # cat tail.c | tail +2 tail: cannot open `+2' for reading: No such file or directory I think tail should print a warning out to STDERR like head does, instead of failing completely, e.g: greebo src # cat head.c | head -2 head: `-2' option is obsolete; use `-n 2' since this will be removed in the future /* head -- output first part of file(s) Copyright (C) 89, 90, 91, 1995-2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: cat <file> | tail +2 Actual Results: tail: cannot open `+2' for reading: No such file or directory Expected Results: (to stderr) tail: `+2' option is obsolete; use `-n 2' since this will be removed in the future I know, I know, the scripts I'm using are broken... but would be nice if they continued to work still. If you are interested, the 3rd party product in question is Veritas NetBackup which generally works fine on Gentoo.
export _POSIX2_VERSION="199209" that should fix your problem. straight from the info page: "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 are running older software that assumes an older version of POSIX and uses `sort +1', you can work around the compatibility problems by setting `_POSIX2_VERSION=199209' in your environment."
