Coreutils head and tail problems

[Joe Buck]

"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:

On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 08:58:13AM -0700, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> 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.

I agree that the fact that the coreutils people broke gcc builds was a
mistake; even if we decide to change, we can't retroactively fix gcc
builds that we have already released.  But which systems don't support
head -n1 and tail -n1?  I've scouted about 8 OS flavors I have access to
(Solaris, HP-UX, SGI-MIPS, Alpha OSF, FreeBSD, Linux, AIX) and they all
handle it.  SunOS4, perhaps?