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Re: diff: bad treatment of symlinks
From: |
Andries E. Brouwer |
Subject: |
Re: diff: bad treatment of symlinks |
Date: |
Wed, 19 Oct 2011 01:25:51 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14) |
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