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Subject: Re: scary thing :-)
From: Horst von Brand (vonbrandinf.utfsm.cl)
Date: Fri May 12 2000 - 14:40:02 CDT

"J. Lasser" <jonumbc.edu> said:
> On Red Hat 6.0, this works correctly, but it breaks in 6.1 and 6.2;
> presumably it's a bug in recent versions of glibc, as it occurs in at
> least two different programs (bash 1.x, 2.x, and head from textutils 2).
> I'd be interested in people reporting what happens with their Linux
> distributions:
>
> The command `cat /etc/passwd [ or anything else ] | head -7` works fine.
> It works fine with head -8, head -9, and head -10.
>
> It works fine with head -01, -02, -03, -04, and so on. But head -08 and
> head -09 produce errors of the following sort:
>
> [jondood home]$ head -08
> head: 08: number of lines is so large that it is not representable
> [jondood home]$

I get (SPARC, Red Hat 6.2, bash-1.14.7-22) the same, and also:

    [vonbrandpincoya ~]$ ((08))
    bash: ((: 08: value too great for base (error token is "08")

This looks more like taking the number in octal to me... from bash(1):

       Constants with a leading 0 are interpreted as octal num­
       bers. A leading 0x or 0X denotes hexadecimal. Otherwise,
       numbers take the form [base#]n, where base is a decimal
       number between 2 and 36 representing the arithmetic base,
       and n is a number in that base. If base is omitted, then
       base 10 is used. 

-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                       mailto:vonbrandinf.utfsm.cl
Departamento de Informatica                     Fono: +56 32 654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria              +56 32 654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile                Fax:  +56 32 797513