Re: bug with diff 2.8.1

[Denver Gingerich]

On 6/5/07, address@hidden <address@hidden> wrote:
> I am using diff 2.8.1 on a knoppix gnu-linux system, version 5.1.
> I have two directory trees of files, which are 1 gigabyte chunks of output from 
> the dd command,
> (binary files).
>
> My system has 2gb of ram.
> I issue the command 'diff –r tree1 tree2'
> After a while, I get an out of memory error.
> I consider this to be a bug because, the two trees are identical.
> I think diff should not run out of memory as long as each file is identical.
>
> For a workaround, I made a ugly script of the form
> cmp –l tree1/file1 tree2/file1
> …
>
> (since cmp doesn't have a –r option).

I would agree that this is a bug.  I was going to suggest you add this
to the diffutils Bugzilla database, but I see that such a thing
doesn't exist.  I'll address this in a different thread to avoid
cluttering this thread with discussion unrelated to your bug report.

Denver