[ale] Re: Installing j2se on RHEL 3?

[Joe Steele]

On Tue, 24 May 2005, Geoffrey wrote:

> Michael Hirsch wrote:
> > On 5/24/05, Geoffrey <esoteric at 3times25.net> wrote:
> > 
> >>Michael Hirsch wrote:
> >>
> >>>Correction:  All references to "less" should have been "tail".  RHEL 3
> >>>has a broken tail ;-)
> >>
> >>Then that functionality is not your problem as 'tail' supports both '-'
> >>and '+' switches.
> > 
> > 
> > I hate to disagree with you, but have you tried RHEL 3 lately?  It has
> > been removed on my version.
> 
> That's quite interesting.  I'm on RHEL 4 now, but just upgraded to 4 
> from 3 when 4 came out and I'd swear that at least tail -1 worked.  RHEL 
> 4 does accept both '-' and '+' switches though.
> 

I think this behavior is controllable.  A vanilla version of tail (from GNU
coreutils-5.2.1) can be forced to exhibit the 'obsolete' behavior if the
environment contains the variable '_POSIX2_VERSION' set to some value less
than 200112.

I don't know about RHEL, but FC3 uses a modified tail command so that the
only way to get the 'new' behavior is to define '_POSIX2_VERSION' >= 200112
and also define POSIXLY_CORRECT in the environment.
 
To get the 'obsolete' behavior, I'd suggest trying:
export _POSIX2_VERSION=199209

--Joe