Re: bug with diff 2.8.1

[Paul Eggert]

<address@hidden> writes:

> 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 can't reproduce the problem.  Perhaps you can try the following
scenario and see whether the problem occurs with your host.
(I am running Debian stable, if that matters.)

523-penguin $ mkdir d e
524-penguin $ dd if=/etc/motd of=d/big obs=1 seek=1GB
0+1 records in
353+0 records out
353 bytes (353 B) copied, 0.0174142 s, 20.3 kB/s
525-penguin $ dd if=/etc/motd of=e/big obs=1 seek=1GB
0+1 records in
353+0 records out
353 bytes (353 B) copied, 0.00102449 s, 345 kB/s
526-penguin $ ls -al d e
d:
total 20
drwxr-xr-x  2 eggert eggert       4096 Jun  5 16:26 .
drwxr-xr-x 12 eggert eggert       4096 Jun  5 16:25 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 eggert eggert 1000000353 Jun  5 16:26 big

e:
total 20
drwxr-xr-x  2 eggert eggert       4096 Jun  5 16:26 .
drwxr-xr-x 12 eggert eggert       4096 Jun  5 16:25 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 eggert eggert 1000000353 Jun  5 16:26 big
527-penguin $ diff -r d e
528-penguin $