Hello. I received this report from the Debian bug system. Thanks.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Vincent Lefevre <[email protected]> To: Debian Bug Tracking System <[email protected]> Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2014 03:06:13 +0100 Subject: Bug#737180: diffutils: diff exit status is 2 instead of 1 on binary files that differ Package: diffutils Version: 1:3.3-1 Severity: normal When diffing binary files that differ, e.g. $ diff /usr/share/doc/diffutils/changelog.Debian.gz /usr/share/doc/diffutils/changelog.gz Binary files /usr/share/doc/diffutils/changelog.Debian.gz and /usr/share/doc/diffutils/changelog.gz differ zsh: exit 2 diff /usr/share/doc/diffutils/changelog.Debian.gz I get exit status 2 instead of 1. The diff(1) man page says: Exit status is 0 if inputs are the same, 1 if different, 2 if trouble. We are in the case where the inputs are different, so that the exit status should be 1. Because of this bug, "svn diff --force --diff-cmd diff" fails on binary files (ditto on more useful cases in practice, where a diff wrapper is used to recognize some binary files, using the default diff behavior as a fallback). [...]
