Miniconda breaks for old versions (or an old version?) of tail

[willirath]

Based on https://repo.continuum.io/miniconda/Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh at v4.7.10.

On an old Linux that has tail from GNU coreutils 8.12 / April 2015.

The file contains

[...]
printf "Unpacking payload ...\n"
if ! tail -c +000000000000018891 "$THIS_PATH" | tail -c +9231072 | tail -c +2 | "$CONDA_EXEC" constructor --extract-tar --prefix "$PREFIX"; then
    printf "ERROR: could not extract tar starting at offset 000000000000018891+9231072+2\\n" >&2
    exit 1
fi
[...]

Here, the tails later in the pipe are supposed to read from stdin but have no explicit -. For more recent GNU coreutils, tail -c seems to default to stdin:

$ man -P cat tail | tail -n1
GNU coreutils 8.25                         February 2017                                    TAIL(1)
$ seq 1 9 | tail -c 2
9

For GNU coreutils 8.12, this is not true:

$ man -P cat 1 tail | tail -n 1
GNU coreutils 8.12                April 2015                           TAIL(1)
$ seq 1 9 | tail -c 2
tail: cannot open `2' for reading: No such file or directory

[willirath]

cc @kgetzlaff

[jjhelmus]

This looks like a bug in constructor, the software which creates the installer. I'm moving this issue to that project.

[nehaljwani]

@willirath Which Linux distro are you using?

[willirath]

I'm not sure. This is on an HPC frontend that runs some stable Redhat. I can try and find out more tomorrow.

[willirath]

It's a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP3.