Re: [bug-diffutils] diff and symlinks

[Andries E. Brouwer]

On Thu, Dec 02, 2010 at 01:47:44PM -0800, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 12/02/10 05:24, Andries E. Brouwer wrote:
> 
> > In short: use lstat instead of stat.
> 
> Yes, I also like this suggestion and it is definitely on the
> List of Things to Do.

Good!

> > Another small change I made to my copy of diff is that two regular
> > files with a length of 0 bytes are not compared. Some programs make
> > empty files of mode 0 and opening them fails, but the files do not differ.
> 
> This has the problem that files like /proc/cpuinfo are mishandled.
> For example:
> 
> cp /proc/uptime /tmp
> diff /proc/uptime /tmp
> 
> That's why "diff" reads length-0 files.  It used to behave as you
> suggest, but we got bug reports.

My diff does not fail here since /tmp/uptime does not have zero length.
But yes, it sees no difference between /proc/meminfo and /proc/uptime.
For me avoiding complaints about the (rather frequent) mode 0 empty
files was more important.

Andries