Coreutils POSIX changes not documented in release notes

[Bill Rugolsky Jr.]

On Thu, Mar 09, 2006 at 06:42:17PM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> >You can disagree all you want, but this is a change from FC4 to FC5:
> >
> >fc4% sort +2 < /var/log/messages | head -1
> >Mar  7 00:27:35 ti63 smartd[2187]: Device: /dev/sda, Temperature changed 
> >-2 Celsius to 35 Celsius since last report
> >
> >rawhide% sort +2 < /var/log/messages | head -1
> >sort: open failed: +2: No such file or directory
> >
> > 
> >
> This seems unrelated to the man page entry you quoted. Can you find more 
> information on this and provide us the content?

I don't mean to be an ass, but do you read before you mouth off?  Judging by
the fedora-* list traffic, no.  Let's try again:

       1003.1-2001.  For example, if you have a newer system but are running
       software that assumes an older version of POSIX and uses `sort +1' or
       `tail +10', you can work around any compatibility problems by setting
       `_POSIX2_VERSION=199209' in your environment.

Sorry, I'm cranky.  Now I have to go put a wrapper around coreutils and
log old-style arguments.

Environment variable tests are completely broken.  That was already known
in the 1970's ...  but I gave up on POSIX when I was a reviewer for the
pthreads drafts ...

	Bill