On Sun, 2008-02-03 at 13:11 +0100, Santiago Vila wrote: > On Sun, 3 Feb 2008, Alain Kalker wrote: > > > Using "cmp -l file1 file2" produces bogus differences. Only the byte > > positions are correct, all but the first 'from' byte are totally bogus. > > The output values even contain values that are > 255. What gives?! > > The values are shown in octal.
Ouch. I just flunked my IQ test big time. I will cut up my geek card and send it to the Debian Foundation. I wonder if it is with some wry sense of humour the original programmer decided not to document this in any way, not in the man page nor in the documentation in diff-doc. The only poor excuse I can find for not noticing is that in my application I converted cmp's output to hex without even thinking about it. > May I close this bug? Sure, It is not a bug in cmp but arguably an omission in its documentation. I might consider opening a wishlist plea to _please_ document this behaviour (cmp producing octal output) properly. In a perfect world no space probes would ever crash on planets because someone confused metric and imperial units and such, but we live in an imperfect world. To err is human. -Alain -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
