Re: diff: bad treatment of symlinks

[Andries E. Brouwer]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 05:48:00PM +0200, Andreas Schwab wrote:
> Andries Brouwer <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > No, certain operations are defined to follow symlinks.
> 
> diff operates on file contents.
> 
> Andreas.

Ha, Andreas.

You are mistaken: diff -r tree1 tree2 operates on filesystem trees
containing all kinds of files.

Long ago I patched diff to do what I wanted
(not read a block or character special file, for example,
if that occurred in the tree - for some devices, reading
has interesting side effects, or just hangs forever;
also: do the right thing w.r.t. symlinks; etc.)
maybe some archive still has that patch.

This evening I did not have diff source nearby and just wrote a
utility  cmptree  that compares two trees and tells about the
differences, something many have wished for. Maybe someone else
also wrote this? In case anybody is interested, I can put it
somewhere.

Andries