On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 5:42 PM, Christoph Anton Mitterer
<[email protected]> wrote:
> It seems that --no-dereference is not documented in the manpage.
Thanks for the report.
However, it is there for me (using diff-3.3), both in "diff --help"
output and in "info diffutils":
$ diff --help|grep no-d
--no-dereference don't follow symbolic links
>From "info diffutils":
'--no-dereference'
Act on symbolic links themselves instead of what they point to.
> Apart from that, --no-dereference seem to me like the more native way
> for a recursive diff to work,... i.e. diffing the values of symlinks
> and not (recursively) the stuff they point to.
It's hard to know which way is more intuitive for more people.
> Since no-dereference is so helpful, could you perhaps add a shortcut -R
> that is recursive + no-dereference?
We add short options only very rarely/carefully, because doing so
risks conflicting with usage in other versions of diff.
> Unfortunately it's probably too late to change -r to behave like --no
> -dereference (and instead add a --dereference and a -R).
-P will eventually be a synonym for --no-dereference.
It used to be documented to mean --unidirectional-new-file,
but that was undocumented in 2002. It is time now to emit
a warning for use of -P, so that we can eventually make it
a synonym for --no-dereference as it is done in numerous
other tools.
