Re: sdiff vs. $EDITOR

[Chuck Swiger]

On Mar 15, 2007, at 11:31 AM, Dan Jacobson wrote:
> sdiff supposedly calls $EDITOR, when not needed too, and that always
> fails.
>
> $ for i in a b; do echo $i >| $i; done
> $ EDITOR=ed sdiff -o c a b
> a            | b
> %r
> sdiff: subsidiary program `ed' failed
> $ sdiff --version
> sdiff (GNU diffutils) 2.8.1

Hi, Dan--

I made a patch about 3 years ago to improve the behavior of sdiff  
with regard to this and with regard to supporting alternative keys  
besides "l" and "r":

  http://www.pkix.net/~chuck/sdiff2.diff

I agree that the former sdiff merge code and invocation of an  
external editor is/was significantly buggy...

--
-Chuck