problem with tail -3540

[tom walsh]

In article <917 at gilbbs.UUCP> mc68020 at gilbbs.UUCP (Thomas J Keller) writes:
>
>   For some reason, expire doesn't trim my history file when it runs.  This
>results in a rather largish history file accruing in my lib/news directory
>pretty quickly.  I tried to use tail to  trim the head end off of the 
>history file and output the result to another file, but it won't work.
>I typed:
>tail -3540 history > newhist
>what I get is the last 72.? lines of history.  Interestingly enough, the
>output file is *ALWAYS* 4096 bytes in length.  On my system, that is the
>size of a pipe buffer (am I saying that right?).  In any case, I can't see
>any reason why this should be the case.
>Oh...I am running XENIX 3.0 on a Tandy 6000.
>please ***HELP***??????
>Disclaimer:  Disclaimer?  DISCLAIMER!? I don't need no stinking DISCLAIMER!!!
>tom keller					"She's alive, ALIVE!"
>{ihnp4, dual}!ptsfa!gilbbs!mc68020
>(* we may not be big, but we're small! *)

there is an array declared of size 4096.
sorry, but it's not my fault...
-tw
ps: my employer did not cause this either.
pss: there are similar problems with dd and skip/count/bs

    microsoft!\
       ogcvax! \
         reed!  \
     <others>!   >omssw2!tw (i think...)
       omssw1!  /
      intelcs! /
     intelisc!/

..tektronix!ogcvax!omssw1!omssw2!tw