Re: Patch for Diffutils 2.7

[Timothy Kilbourn]

> But I'm still missing the motivation.  Can you provide some examples?
> The comments in your code indicate a problem with "patch", but "patch"
> ignores the "Only in" lines.

The motivation was not for patch, but simply for looking for differences
in files. The option would probably never be used for patches. My example
dealt with a clear case source tree and a local copy of that source tree
that I wanted to compare. My local tree had object files and dependency
files and backup files that did not exist in the clearcase tree, and since
there were several files to be compared, I didn't want to have to sort
through all the "Only in" output. This could have been done with grep, but
it clearly took one integer flag and about 5 or 6 other lines of code to
do it within diff, and doesn't require knowledge of regular expressions. I
realize this isn't a big deal, and most people using diff probably know
how to use grep, but I thought it was useful and would make diff a little
more useful by itself.

Timothy