Re: design problem in 'diff -r' comparing 2 trees.

[Morgan Weetman]

I'm not sure this is the correct list for your query... but does your diff
not have a '--no-dereference' option?

On 17 July 2018 at 19:06, L A Walsh <address@hidden> wrote:

>
> Problem I'm running into is comparing two copies of tree that also
> contains multiple symlinks.
>
> First -- I see no way of telling diff not to follow symlinks in
> doing comparisons.  This seems non-standard for unix/linux utils and in
> this case is causing alot of needless comparing like
>
> trying to compare 'bin' and 'wbin' in my home dir.
> under bin, is a lib directory.  Additionally some small projects
> also have their own directory under bin, but have a symlink
> ../lib to get access to library files.
>
> Already, I'm getting multiple compares on the subtree 'lib' -- many
> of which are generating errors as loops like
> bin/prog/lib/bin <- may not exist if bin is a symlink pointing to the
> parent bin......etc.  needless to say, it is a mess.
>
> Instead of the couple of files I expected to find different,
> I'm ending up with a 250K file of diffs -- most of which
> are bogus compares.
>
> So how do I prevent diff from following symlinks - and more usefully,
> maybe compare the contents of such symlinks (i.e. most of them
> are relative and should be the same between the two trees being compared).
>
> Am I missing a switch to not follow symlinks?
> Seems so basic, its hard to believe it wouldn't already be there....(?)
>
> Thanks
> -l
>
>
>


-- 
Morgan Weetman
Services Content Architect
M: +61 439 469 793
https://www.redhat.com/en/services/training