Just discovered this. IMHO, this massive breakage needs to be documented (in allcaps) in the FC5 Release notes: % info coreutils Standards 2.9 Standards conformance ========================= In a few cases, the GNU utilities' default behavior is incompatible with the POSIX standard. To suppress these incompatibilities, define the `POSIXLY_CORRECT' environment variable. Unless you are checking for POSIX conformance, you probably do not need to define `POSIXLY_CORRECT'. Newer versions of POSIX are occasionally incompatible with older versions. For example, older versions of POSIX required the command `sort +1' to sort based on the second and succeeding fields in each input line, but starting with POSIX 1003.1-2001 the same command is required to sort the file named `+1', and you must instead use the command `sort -k 2' to get the field-based sort. The GNU utilities normally conform to the version of POSIX that is standard for your system. To cause them to conform to a different version of POSIX, define the `_POSIX2_VERSION' environment variable to a value of the form YYYYMM specifying the year and month the standard was adopted. Two values are currently supported for `_POSIX2_VERSION': `199209' stands for POSIX 1003.2-1992, and `200112' stands for POSIX 1003.1-2001. For example, if you have a newer system but are running software that assumes an older version of POSIX and uses `sort +1' or `tail +10', you can work around any compatibility problems by setting `_POSIX2_VERSION=199209' in your environment. I don't see anything about it here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Beats I was all excited about upgrading some servers to FC5, and this stops that upgrade cold until every one of hundreds of locally written scripts, some two decades old, are audited and "fixed." Ugh, sometimes POSIX is just ridiculous. Regards, Bill Rugolsky