Actually, the old-style option was +N to print out lines from N-th to the end. The new-style option does not permit it anymore, even if -N can still be used. However you can force tail to conform to the old POSIX standard, by setting the following environment variable
Code:
export _POSIX2_VERSION=199209
I don't know how this affects other commands, anyway. You can try to look for more detailed informations on the coreutils site.