Subject: bug#7424: Tail -n doesn't work on Red-Hat Linux 5.5

From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 11:13:32 -0700

On 11/17/2010 07:55 AM, Parsons, Larry wrote:

[not much]

> ________________________________
> This e-mail and files transmitted with it are confidential,

In general, it is considered poor netiquette to send an email to a
publicly archived list with a disclaimer that cannot be enforced.
Furthermore, when you don't have any meaningful text other than your
subject line, without giving any indication that you intended your
subject line to be the body of the message, it creates a rather high
spam score that makes your message more likely to be discarded.

You didn't describe "doesn't work" very well for use to diagnose your
problem.  Listing an actual session of what you typed, what you got, and
what you expected, would go a long way to making this a more meaningful
bug report.  But my ESP senses are working overtime today, so I'm going
to guess:

http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/faq/#Old-tail-plus-N-syntax-now-fails

You're probably trying to do 'tail +1 file', when you should instead be
doing 'tail -n +1 file' (not quite the tail -n you mentioned in your
subject line).

-- 
Eric Blake   [email-masked]    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org