i have a situation where diff -r of two directories fails to report differences that diff of two files in those directories shows
i haven't dug into the code yet, but the directories involved are on an NFS mount of a netapp filer, one is the copy-on-write snapshot counterpart of the other, they show up as the same filesystem, and are the same inode so my guess is that there's something in the recursive traversal that says that any two directories that are on the same fs and are the same inode must have identical descendent contents and can be skipped completely this fs probably violates POSIX by doing this, but there's no easy way around it[1], so it would be very useful if diff had a command-line option to turn that optimization off i've heard anecdotal reports of other filesystems that cause the same problem here's a sample session: $ mkdir foo $ echo baz >foo/bar $ # wait until the next snapshot is created $ echo quux >foo/bar $ diff -r .snapshot/nightly.0/foo foo $ diff .snapshot/nightly.0/foo/bar foo/bar 1c1 < baz --- > quux $ stat -c %i .snapshot/nightly.0/foo foo 69403847 69403847 $ -- Aaron Davies [email protected] [1] when i ran into this, i ended up using something like diff <(find .snapshot/nightly.0/foo -type f|sort|xargs cat) <(find foo -type f|sort|xargs cat) to do the comparison -- sufficient for my needs at the time, but cleaning it up for general purpose use would essentially be rewriting the -r part of diff from scratch
