[illumos-Developer] Establishing requirements and test cases for tail replacement

[cjlove at san.rr.com]

Hi all,

So I've been working on possible replacements for the closed bin 'tail' commands (/usr/bin/tail and /usr/xpg4/bin/tail) starting with the FreeBSD
version.  Getting the FreeBSD version to build and run on Solaris was simple enough, but beyond that there's the issue of actual requirements and test cases. 

Comparing Solaris and FreeBSD tail there are different levels of standards compliance:  FreeBSD tail is said to be a superset of
POSIX.2 (IEEE 1003.2-1992), while the legacy Solaris version cites IEEE 1003.1-2008.   

There are command-line usage differences which can be corrected in the FreeBSD code to match the legacy Solaris version.

The Solaris tail(1) manpage specifies LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE as affecting its behavior.  I see no evidence that the FreeBSD code deals with this issue and I'm going to plead some level of ignorance here as a US developer who has never dealt with anything other than the default POSIX locale.  

>From a test case standpoint I have derived some test cases from CoreUtils, validating them against the legacy Solaris tail to weed out
GNU-specific features; this is by no means complete at this point.  POSIX compatibility test suites aside are there any (Solaris-specific) test suites available? 

Regards,

    Chris