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I'm looking through some of the scripts that are on the servers and came across an 80MB shell script. Naturally curious I decided to look in there and came across this line:

tail +4802 $0 |
zcat - |
(cd $LANG_TMP &&
 tar -xf - loc/$LANGPRE$LANGPOST.po loc/poextract)  >>/dev/null 2>>/dev/null

Can someone give me a general gist of what this line is supposed to do? I've never seen a tail + command before, usually it's tail -.

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    Read the man page, it explains it there. – 123 Jun 25 '15 at 14:38
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    Probably your huge script is a shar like archive. Try tail --help & read tail(1) – Basile Starynkevitch Jun 25 '15 at 14:39
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Using a plus means start printing from the nth line from the beginning of the file.

so +4802 will print from line 4802 till the end.

man tail gives you a manual page.

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  • Interesting but when I actually try running tail +2 on a different file I get the following error: tail: cannot open `+2' for reading: No such file or directory – jabbajac Jun 25 '15 at 14:51
  • It might be a function in your script, invoking /usr/bin/tail – Basile Starynkevitch Jun 25 '15 at 14:57
  • well you have to give it a filename to read, or else it will assume stdin – X Tian Jun 25 '15 at 15:03
  • The command I gave was tail +2 testfile.txt and got the error: tail: cannot open `+2' for reading: No such file or directory. It does work with tail -n +2 testfile.txt though. – jabbajac Jun 25 '15 at 15:48
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    @jabbajac: Newer versions of the POSIX spec don't support the +42 and -42 arguments for tail; instead, you have to type -n +42 or -n -42. You can enable the older syntax with export _POSIX2_VERSION=199209. pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/tail.html – Keith Thompson Jun 25 '15 at 23:51

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