I am sympathetic to your desires, but the man page clearly states the implemented behavior: $ tail --version | head -n 1 tail (GNU coreutils) 8.5 $

I am sympathetic to your desires, but the man page clearly states the implemented behavior: $ tail --version | head -n 1 tail (GNU coreutils) 8.5 $ man tail | grep -A 2 bytes=K -c, --bytes=K output the last K bytes; alternatively, use -c +K to output bytes starting with the Kth of each file The fifth byte of '0123456789' is the byte corresponding to '4', and the manpage says it will output bytes starting with the 5th (ie 456789)