Problem I'm running into is comparing two copies of tree that also
contains multiple symlinks.
First -- I see no way of telling diff not to follow symlinks in
doing comparisons. This seems non-standard for unix/linux utils and in
this case is causing alot of needless comparing like
trying to compare 'bin' and 'wbin' in my home dir.
under bin, is a lib directory. Additionally some small projects
also have their own directory under bin, but have a symlink
../lib to get access to library files.
Already, I'm getting multiple compares on the subtree 'lib' -- many
of which are generating errors as loops like
bin/prog/lib/bin <- may not exist if bin is a symlink pointing to the
parent bin......etc. needless to say, it is a mess.
Instead of the couple of files I expected to find different,
I'm ending up with a 250K file of diffs -- most of which
are bogus compares.
So how do I prevent diff from following symlinks - and more usefully,
maybe compare the contents of such symlinks (i.e. most of them
are relative and should be the same between the two trees being compared).
Am I missing a switch to not follow symlinks?
Seems so basic, its hard to believe it wouldn't already be there....(?)
Thanks
-l
