How to totally confuse "diff" with softlinks

[David J. Coffin]

Hello,

     "diff" mistakes a softlink to "." for a subdirectory
that must be descended, with bizarre results:

        mkdir 1 2
        ln -s . 1/link
        ln -s . 2/link
        diff -r 1 2

     This patch seems to solve the problem, by causing diff
to dismiss soft links as "weird files", and not follow them:

--- diffutils-2.7/diff.c        Thu Sep 22 12:47:00 1994
+++ diffutils-2.7/diff.c        Mon Oct 22 16:12:01 2001
@@ -912,7 +912,7 @@
                }
            }
          else
-           stat_result = stat (inf[i].name, &inf[i].stat);
+           stat_result = lstat (inf[i].name, &inf[i].stat);
 
          if (stat_result != 0)
            {

                                Dave Coffin  10/22/2001
--
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