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Re: [bug-diffutils] diff and symlinks
From: |
Hugo Mildenberger |
Subject: |
Re: [bug-diffutils] diff and symlinks |
Date: |
Sat, 4 Dec 2010 09:44:58 +0100 |
User-agent: |
KMail/1.13.5 (Linux/2.6.36-hardened-r1; KDE/4.5.3; x86_64; ; ) |
On Thursday 02 December 2010 14:24:51 Andries E. Brouwer wrote:
[....]
> What one wants to see is the smallest list of changes that change
> one tree into the other, the input to a hypothetical version of patch.
> Certainly the diff that produces this patch input does not follow
> symlinks.
>
> Another small change I made to my copy of diff is that two regular
> files with a length of 0 bytes are not compared. Some programs make
> empty files of mode 0 and opening them fails, but the files do not differ.
>
Almost a month ago, in a message to bug-diffutils, I described the inverse
of this problem: running diff against a non-existing file and an equally named
existing file file of zero length resulted in no output. Any real version of
patch
therefore has no chance to create that file. I repeat my example here:
$ diff --version
$ diff (GNU diffutils) 3.0
Packaged by Gentoo (3.0)
$ mkdir a/c -p
$ mkdir b/c -p
$ touch b/c/emptyfile
$ diff -urN a b
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-diffutils/2010-11/msg00005.html