Coreutils head and tail problems

[Zack Weinberg]

"Andrew Walrond" <andrew@walrond.org> writes:

> As I'm sure you know, head -1, tail -1 have been deprecated in favour of
> head -n1 and tail -n1 in recent gnu coreutils, and indeed no longer works in
> the latest releases.
>
> But, a quick grep of 3.3.1 or mainline sources shows lots of instances of
> the old usage:

These are deliberate and will not change.  GCC has to maintain
backward compatibility with platforms which do not support head -n1,
tail -n1, etc ... the issues you have found are merely the tip of the
iceberg.

Coreutils MUST continue to support the command line syntaxes that were
removed from POSIX.1-2001, for at least the next five years.  Ten
years would be better.  Forever would be better still.  And "support"
means "silently accept, regardless of environment variable or
compile-time settings."

Please take this up with the coreutils maintainers.

zw