Saw them... But in this specific case it doesn't complain, it trows out a "file not found error.."

Well ,... Tankyou, my script now works well.
But i still think it's a bug. The old style compatibility is meant to accept options like "tail -20", without "-c". This explains also why -c -2 works, and not -c +2.

Now i'm wondering why your last command didn't give you an error........

Was looking this morning at the online help ...

-c, --bytes=[+]NUM output the last NUM bytes; or use -c +NUM to
output starting with byte NUM of each file


And according to this i understand that :
set NN=3

-c +NN output starting from NN bytes, so mylongstring --> longstring (starting from 3rd ...

So it's not a bug, it's a feature

Thankyou..

So in the slackware/salix version the use of -c +XX is invalid? If so, why compiling without the slackbuild generate a working binary?

Found a workaround...
Downloaded coreutils 9.3 + slackbuild from slackware current source tree, compiled but the issue remain, but if compile outside the slackbuild, from a vanilla source, the resulting tail works as expected. So hase to be something related to the patch the slackbuild introduce.

Hi to everyone... First post on the board.
Developing a bash script, i faced this issue:
The command
echo Mylongstring | tail -c +2 gives me this error:

tail: impossibile aprire '+2' per la lettura: File o directory non esistente
(Transalted : can't open '+2' for reading: File or Directory not ...