"tail" command does not work as advertised

Eric Blake eblake@redhat.com
Wed Mar 3 03:30:00 GMT 2010


According to Chris Sutcliffe on 3/2/2010 8:01 PM:
>> The "tail +4" commands does not work as advertised.  When given such command
>> (advertised in man command), it complains it can't open the file.  With the
>> command "tail +5 -", it produces the desired output with some junk on
>> standard output.
> 
> As per the tail manpage:
> 
>        -n, --lines=N
>               output the last N lines, instead of the last 10; or use
> +N to output lines starting with the Nth
> 
> Note that the +N notation is specific to --lines=, not the '-n'
> shorthand.

Wrong - the +N notation also works with -n:

ps -a | tail -n +5

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake@redhat.com    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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