tail in 1003.2 Commands

[Moderator, John Quarterman]

From: colonel at sunybcs.UUCP (Col. G. L. Sicherman)
Date: 12 Jan 87 15:18:10 GMT
Organization: Jack of Clubs Precision Instruments

> From: hoptoad!gnu at lll-crg.arpa (John Gilmore)
> Date: Sat, 27 Dec 86 02:57:15 PST
> 
> ... Tail should be in the mandatory set of commands.

I know that tail is in BSD.  Is it a Berkeley product?  There's one thing
about it I don't like.  When you type "tail +10c" you get all characters
starting with the tenth.

Now, that's un-Unixican.  Characters start at 0, and perhaps blocks and
lines should too.  As it is, if I want a shell command or expression
in the argument, I usually have to add 1 to it to make it work.

I'd like to see a program that does what tail does, except that if
you say "tail +n" it skips the first n units.  You could call it
something else--maybe "trail."  And how about a "head" with the same
syntax as tail/trail?  ("head xx file; tail xx file" = "cat file")
-- 
Col. G. L. Sicherman
UU: ...{rocksvax|decvax}!sunybcs!colonel
CS: colonel at buffalo-cs
BI: colonel at sunybcs, csdsiche at ubvms

Volume-Number: Volume 9, Number 20