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info diff - diff exitcodes (and perhaps wrong exitcodes in diff)
From: |
Christian Boltz |
Subject: |
info diff - diff exitcodes (and perhaps wrong exitcodes in diff) |
Date: |
Tue, 14 Oct 2003 21:07:07 +0200 |
User-agent: |
KMail/1.5.3 |
Hello,
(you may answer in German if you want)
I use diff (GNU diffutils) 2.8.1 on SuSE Linux 8.2.
There is an unclear statement in "info diff":
| An exit status of 0 means no differences were found, 1 means some
| differences were found, and 2 means trouble.
This sentence can be misinterpreted - what does "means trouble" mean?
IMHO, it means trouble to programmers that use diff in their scripts ;-)
I use diff to compare fonts (see mail signature) and expected the
exitcode ($?) beeing 1 when calling diff '1.ttf' '2.ttf' on
different files. Instead, I get exitcode 2.
(I could resolve the problem by using diff -q '1.ttf' '2.ttf' which
returns the expected exitcode 1 on different binaries.)
improvement suggestion for 'info diff':
===
Exit status
- 0 means no differences were found
- 1 means some differences were found and (if not using -q) a patch
could be created
- 2 means trouble. Reasons for this can be:
- differences in binary files and -q was *not* given
- one of the given files does not exist or is not readable
- ...
===
BTW: perhaps there's a wrong exitcode in diff. When calling
diff -r dir1/ dir2/ # *without* -N
I get a message
Only in dir1/: file1
with $? = 1, but the resulting patch is not complete (file1 is missing
in it). Shouldn't the exitcode also be 2 in this case?
If you change this, add the following to the reaons for exitcode 2:
- a file exists only in one directory when comparing recursively and
-N was *not* given
- or shorter: the displayed patch is incomplete [1]
Yours,
Christian Boltz
[1] concerns the -q and the -N option
--
Fontlinge developer
Fontlinge - font management for Linux / Schriftenverwaltung for Linux
Infos and Download: http://www.gesindel.de
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