Problems with 'tail -n *'

[Gustavo Seabra]

Hi All,

I just noticed this one thing when using 'tail' in cygwin. For some
reason, when using a '*' so as to 'tail' multiple files at once, the
'-n' option to tail doesn't work anymore. Note that I tried without
the '-n', and it works just as it should, i.e., 'tail *.dat' actually
gives teh last 10 lines of each '.dat' file (I'm not showing this
example just to save space). It is only the '-n' option that doesn't
work anymore. It works fine on a linux computer we have (tail
(coreutils) 5.2.1). See an example below:

$ which tail
/usr/bin/tail
$ tail --version
tail (GNU coreutils) 6.10
Copyright (C) 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Written by Paul Rubin, David MacKenzie, Ian Lance Taylor, and Jim Meyering.

$ tail -2 am1_avg-ie.dat
     5.998     1.5559    -5.3844    -6.0068
     6.000     1.5568    -5.3841    -6.0066

$ tail -2 *.dat
tail: option used in invalid context -- 2


All the best,
Gustavo

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