taskSavannah Administration - Tasks: task #10898, Special treetment for symlinks and...

 
 

task #10898: Special treetment for symlinks and special files needed

Submitter:  None
Submitted:  Wed 26 Jan 2011 01:20:32 AM UTC
   
 
Should Start On:  Wed 26 Jan 2011 12:00:00 AM UTC Should be Finished on:  Wed 26 Jan 2011 12:00:00 AM UTC
Category:  Approved Projects to be Reviewed Priority:  5 - Normal
Status:  Cancelled Privacy:  Public
Assigned to:  None Open/Closed:  Closed
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Thu 27 Jan 2011 01:05:45 PM UTC, comment #2: 

Sorry for my misunderstanding...

I thought what I found here on the savannah project page of the diffutils would be the bugtracker of diffutils.

I hate mailing lists because it's easy for robots to harvest valid mail addresses in mailing list archives.

Anonymous
Wed 26 Jan 2011 07:35:52 PM UTC, comment #1: 

Hello anonymous -- this isn't a savannah issue.  You should send the suggestion to bug-diffutils (@) gnu.org.

However, there's certainly no chance that such options will be implemented quickly, even if the suggestion is accepted.  For your purposes, I would generate file lists with find, and exclude the symlinks and special files that way, instead of just doing diff -r.

Best,
Karl


Karl Berry <karl>
Site Administrator
Wed 26 Jan 2011 01:20:32 AM UTC, original submission:  

- Symlinks should be compared by readlink instead of comparing the target files.
- Special files such as device files should be compared by checking the major / minor number
- fifos ...
- have I forgotten something ?

Yes, I know, that this can not be used for creating patches, but diff is not only used for creating patches. ;-)

The special handling could be optional, activated by command line switches.

Use case:

As a person still learning to work with GNU/Linux, I sometimes create a clone copy of my system partition on another partition before doing large configuraiton changes in order to have a bootable backup system in the old state.
After copying (I always do this using a live CD), I would like to verify the copied data using diff. Yes, I already experienced a few turned bits during copying. Since that, I never copy large amounts of data without verifying anymore.

I also would like to use diff for analyzing the differences between the reconfigured and the backup system, especially if the reconfiguration crashes it :-)
That's the second reason why I don't use tar for backup.

And here comes the problem:

All the symlinks and all the special files produce so many diff errors that it is really hard (if not impossible) to see the real differences.
The errors in the symlinks occur because I do the diff in the live system, too. So, every symlink that points to something starting with / is broken because the mount points of the / partition is something like /mnt/system1 while in the live sysstem. Comparing symlinks via readlink just would not care for that.

And you never can check for a changed symlink (would be especially useful for /etc/alternatives) or a device major/minor number.

It would be extremely helpful to me to have a --no-dereference and a --special-files switch.

Thanks and Regards ...

Anonymous

 

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    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2011-01-26 karl CategoryNone Approved Projects to be Reviewed
        StatusNone Cancelled
        Open/ClosedOpen Closed

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