F8: Bug in diff ?

John Dennis jdennis at redhat.com
Fri Nov 2 14:30:25 UTC 2007


Ian Thurlbeck wrote:
> 
> Dear All
> 
> please confirm that what I'm seeing here is a bug before I bugzilla it.
> 
> Create 2 files, f1, f2 with contents "abc" and "abc " (without quotes),
> i.e. the same line with a space on the end.
> 
> Diff ignoring whitespace:
> 
> diff -b f1 f2
> 
> should produce no diff output, but does on F8. Works fine on FC6.
>

Ha, that's amusing, I noticed the same thing yesterday but I thought it
was me being silly and ignored it thinking how could one of the most
heavily used utilities be this broken and not have any reported bugs?

The options -w and -b report differences where none exist.

This was confirmed by looking at the two files in a hex editor just to 
make sure a non-printing character wasn't the culprit, but the areas 
flagged as different were byte identical and turning off -w or -b 
resulted in no differences, completely counterintuitive.

-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>




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