Re: support for POSIX 1003.1-2001 hosts

Paul Eggert wrote:
> > From: "Christopher Kings-Lynne" <chriskl(at)familyhealth(dot)com(dot)au>
> > Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 10:35:35 +0800
> > Importance: Normal
> >
> > What's wrong with "head -n 1"?
>
> Nothing's wrong with it from a standards-compliance point of view.
>
> But I worry that "head -n 1" may not work on some older (pre-POSIX)
> hosts, as it did not work on Unix Version 7 hosts. In contrast, "sed
> q" did work on those ancient hosts, so I figure "sed q" should be
> safer. "sed 1q" should be equally good from a portability viewpoint,
> if you prefer.

I have made the 'sed 1q' change you suggested in configure.in, but not
in the docs because I thought it would be too confusing. The sort
changes, however, were not embraced, as I suspected. Certainly when we
hit a platform that doesn't understand sort +/-, we will need to make
that change.

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