Re: Width not working with diff -y

[Paul Eggert]

"Barry" <address@hidden> writes:

> I think there's a bug in setting width for diff -y. I tried the command:
>
> diff -y -W 2048 http://www.polisource.com
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
>
> with GNU Diffutils 2.8.1, but line 119 of the second file was truncated even
> though the line contains fewer than 2048 characters.

-W specifies the maximum width of the output line, not the width of
the input line.  diff -y output lines contain the contents of two
input lines (one from each file), plus a gutter in between, plus
appropriate alignment for tabs, so if you specify -W 2048 then diff
will output slightly less than 1024 columns per file.  I hope that
explains the behavior you're observing.