Just discovered this.
IMHO, this massive breakage needs to be documented (in allcaps) in the
FC5 Release notes:
% info coreutils Standards
2.9 Standards conformance
=========================
In a few cases, the GNU utilities' default behavior is incompatible
with the POSIX standard. To suppress these incompatibilities, define
the `POSIXLY_CORRECT' environment variable. Unless you are checking
for POSIX conformance, you probably do not need to define
`POSIXLY_CORRECT'.
Newer versions of POSIX are occasionally incompatible with older
versions. For example, older versions of POSIX required the command
`sort +1' to sort based on the second and succeeding fields in each
input line, but starting with POSIX 1003.1-2001 the same command is
required to sort the file named `+1', and you must instead use the
command `sort -k 2' to get the field-based sort.
The GNU utilities normally conform to the version of POSIX that is
standard for your system. To cause them to conform to a different
version of POSIX, define the `_POSIX2_VERSION' environment variable to
a value of the form YYYYMM specifying the year and month the standard
was adopted. Two values are currently supported for `_POSIX2_VERSION':
`199209' stands for POSIX 1003.2-1992, and `200112' stands for POSIX
1003.1-2001. For example, if you have a newer system but are running
software that assumes an older version of POSIX and uses `sort +1' or
`tail +10', you can work around any compatibility problems by setting
`_POSIX2_VERSION=199209' in your environment.
I don't see anything about it here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Beats
I was all excited about upgrading some servers to FC5, and this stops
that upgrade cold until every one of hundreds of locally written scripts,
some two decades old, are audited and "fixed."
Ugh, sometimes POSIX is just ridiculous.
Regards,
Bill Rugolsky
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