Gold ol' Linux, bad ol' Posix. This time FC5 has broken my shell
scripts by redefining the flags for the 'tail' command. Most notably,
by deleting the second most used flag '+#', used to concatenate a file
beginning at line #.

Are there any systems administrators of more than 19 years old who work
a Redhat or on Posix braindead "specifications"?

George

George Fletcher wrote:
> Gold ol' Linux, bad ol' Posix. This time FC5 has broken my shell
> scripts by redefining the flags for the 'tail' command. Most notably,
> by deleting the second most used flag '+#', used to concatenate a file
> beginning at line #.
>
> Are there any systems administrators of more than 19 years old who work
> a Redhat or on Posix braindead "specifications"?

IMHO.. no. Red Hat doesn't believe that Unix compatibility is
important.

SUSE on the other hand... (if you have to use Linux)...

George Fletcher wrote:
> Gold ol' Linux, bad ol' Posix. This time FC5 has broken my shell
> scripts by redefining the flags for the 'tail' command. Most notably,
> by deleting the second most used flag '+#', used to concatenate a file
> beginning at line #.
>
> Are there any systems administrators of more than 19 years old who work
> a Redhat or on Posix braindead "specifications"?

Not sure about their ages. However, SUSE still believes in
having Unix compatibility. If you need Linux, you can give
it a try instead of Red Hat.

["Followup-To:" header set to comp.os.linux.misc.]
On 2006-08-24, George Fletcher wrote:
>
> Gold ol' Linux, bad ol' Posix. This time FC5 has broken my shell
> scripts by redefining the flags for the 'tail' command. Most notably,
> by deleting the second most used flag '+#', used to concatenate a file
> beginning at line #.

Perhaps it's "FC5" that sucks, and not "Linux"?

You'd think someone who posts to Usenet using tin would know the
difference. Hell, you'd wonder why someone like that would be using FC
in the first place.


--
"Ubuntu" - an African word meaning "Slackware is too hard for me".

George Fletcher <geflet@not-for-mail.net> wrote:
> Gold ol' Linux, bad ol' Posix. This time FC5 has broken my shell scripts by
> redefining the flags for the 'tail' command. Most notably, by deleting the
> second most used flag '+#', used to concatenate a file beginning at line #.

Is there anything preventing you from replacing that tail(1) with one that
works for you? At work, I have to live with RedHat, while my operating system
of choice is FreeBSD and the Linux I consider the least annoying is Slackware
(busybox doesn't really count). It took me a while to make RedHat mostly
behaved but since I've got it set up the way I want to, I've found more useful
things to complain about.

Thank $deity for POSIX! It means I can run all the software I run on other
Unixes on Linux too - no matter how hard "distribution X" tries to make it for
me.

See my blog rant on the topic:

<http://www.paeps.cx/weblog/2006/Jan/03/>

> Are there any systems administrators of more than 19 years old who work a
> Redhat or on Posix braindead "specifications"?

I'm sure there are.

- Philip

--
Philip Paeps Please don't email any replies
philip@paeps.cx I follow the newsgroup.

Don't ask the barber if you need a haircut.

On Wednesday 23 August 2006 21:46 a poster that claims to be Chris Cox wrote:

> George Fletcher wrote:
>> Gold ol' Linux, bad ol' Posix. This time FC5 has broken my shell
>> scripts by redefining the flags for the 'tail' command. Most notably,
>> by deleting the second most used flag '+#', used to concatenate a file
>> beginning at line #.
>>
>> Are there any systems administrators of more than 19 years old who work
>> a Redhat or on Posix braindead "specifications"?
>
> IMHO.. no. Red Hat doesn't believe that Unix compatibility is
> important.
>
> SUSE on the other hand... (if you have to use Linux)...

I love SUSE, except it not being good for musician type work.

I created a Debian partition with Agnula on hdb3. I chose ReiserFS like I
also have with my main SUSE partition, hdb2. (Hdb1 is the swap area.) I can
see the drive in SUSE but can't mount it. . . so far.
--
Regards,
TimeTraveler

One good thing about music,
when it hits you, you feel no pain.
- Bob Marley

In comp.os.linux.misc Philip Paeps <philip+usenet@paeps.cx> wrote:
: of choice is FreeBSD and the Linux I consider the least annoying is Slackware
: (busybox doesn't really count). It took me a while to make RedHat mostly
: behaved but since I've got it set up the way I want to, I've found more useful
: things to complain about.

: Thank $deity for POSIX! It means I can run all the software I run on other
: Unixes on Linux too - no matter how hard "distribution X" tries to make it for
: me.

umm- last I heard Linux isn't Posix compliant. Unless this has changed
recently what you describe isn't going to fly.

Stan

--
Stan Bischof ("stan" at the below domain)
www.worldbadminton.com

George Fletcher wrote:
> Gold ol' Linux, bad ol' Posix. This time FC5 has broken my shell
> scripts by redefining the flags for the 'tail' command. Most notably,
> by deleting the second most used flag '+#', used to concatenate a file
> beginning at line #.
>

I couldn't believe this when I read it so I went and checked my system
(yes...I'm using FC5, please hold your flames till after the speech) and
sure enough it's true. I can't believe this. I use this kind of thing in
scripting all the time never believing I'd have to worry about it going
away on certain platforms. Can anyone suggest a good way to obtain the
same behavior with another built in command? All I can think of at the
moment is:

awk 'NR>=#' file

As a side note. If I want to get away from FC5 (yes...this issue is
enough to dishearten me) can anyone recommend a flavor that wouldn't put
me into culture shock. I'm not looking for a distro war here, just
genuinely would like to know something that's similar to FC (if that
even makes sense) but maybe more Posix. I've never used any other distro
other than FC. While I'm very familiar with FC, I can't say what my
familiarity with linux in general is due this limited experience. I do
my own sysadmin at home on this linux box though and I don't use GUI's
for any sysadmin, I prefer konsole (xterm) and vi. Thanks.

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