Re: utility head is not backward compatible

[Bob Proulx]

Patrick West wrote:
> I downloaded the latest and greatest core utilities. The first problem I
> found is that head is not backward compatible.

The latest and greatest coreutils version is coreutils-6.9.  Is that
the version to which you are referring?  If it is not then please
report the version that you are using.  Or even better please do try
the latest version.

GNU Coreutils version 6.9 was released as stable March 22, 2007.

> head -1 <file> no longer works, but a great many scripts still rely on this
> api. Is there a way to tell it to accept this command without downloading
> the source and changing it myself?

Previously the -NUM option syntax had been suppressed as part of a
move for improved standards conformance.  But the NEWS entry for
coreutils-5.90 dated 2005-09-29 says:

  Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
  conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001.

This leads me to believe that you are actually not using the latest
and greatest version by a couple of years.  :-)

Bob