[PATCH] Don't use tail +NNN

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Fri, 8 Jul 2005, Paolo Bonzini wrote:

> The fink 0.8.0 distribution of textutils has the infamous problem of
> deprecating "tail -NNN" and "tail +NNN", and make compare has started failing
> for me since I installed Tiger.  The attached patch avoids this, using "tail
> -c +16" instead of "tail +16c".

The same point as in bug 14251 and all other previous discussions of this 
issue arises: the POSIX options may not be sufficiently portable.  How far 
back does "tail -c" go?  Do you have evidence that we no longer support 
any systems (as build systems, not targets) without it?  Perhaps it's 
necessary to start with a proposal to cease support for host or build 
systems without certain tools supporting at least POSIX.2-1992 features.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers               http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/
    jsm@polyomino.org.uk (personal mail)
    joseph@codesourcery.com (CodeSourcery mail)
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