bug with diff 2.8.1

[jdeifik]

I am using diff 2.8.1 on a knoppix gnu-linux system, version 5.1.
I have two directory trees of files, which are 1 gigabyte chunks of output from 
the dd command,
(binary files).

My system has 2gb of ram.
I issue the command ‘diff –r tree1 tree2’
After a while, I get an out of memory error.
I consider this to be a bug because, the two trees are identical.
I think diff should not run out of memory as long as each file is identical.

For a workaround, I made a ugly script of the form
cmp –l tree1/file1 tree2/file1
…

(since cmp doesn’t have a –r option).

Thanks,
Jeff Deifik, address@hidden