I too doubt this is directly related to diff (but I could be wrong). Is the clean_dir by chance on a network share? I did have a similar problem with a Samba share. If someone logged onto the Samba machine and modified a file, then a Windows machine on the network would not detect that the file had been changed because the Windows machine was caching the file. This was fixed by putting the option "oplocks = False" in the smb.conf file. I'm not sure if NFS exported directories might have similar problems. This probably doesn't help, but I thought it might be worth a shot.
Gerry On Wed, 17 Nov 1999, David Wright wrote: > Quoting Colin Marquardt ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > > > apparently diff caches stuff in memory. > > That seems unlikely. I thought linux did that itself. > > > I noticed that when I wanted to make a patch with > > > > diff -urN clean_dir patched_dir > my_patch > > > > The patch came out fine, but then I realized that clean_dir wasn´t > > really clean, so I made a new clean version *with the same* directory > > name. > > > > The second time I ran diff it went really fast. Too fast: it didn´t > > examine the files in clean_dir at all, it just used the data from > > the previous run which it had cached, so my patch was the same as > > before (wrong). > > I'm not sure what you mean by "made a new clean version". > (I'm sure you know that -N means any empty files that were > cleaned away will have no effect on diff's output.) > > > How can I get diff to forget what it saw? The manpage doesn´t tell > > me. (I didn´t think about `touch'ing the directory then, but I > > untarred clean_dir from a tarball, so it should have gotten a newer > > time stamp). > > I didn't know diff bothered about timestamps, and I doubt kernel > caching uses them either. (Of course, programs like tar and zip do.) > > So, were I examining evidence, I'd be interested to know how you > cleaned clean_dir, and I'd want to see a log showing diff getting > the wrong answers (i.e. the diff output and two cats of affected > files). > > Cheers, > > -- > Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: +44 1908 653 739 Fax: +44 1908 655 151 > Snail: David Wright, Earth Science Dept., Milton Keynes, England, MK7 6AA > Disclaimer: These addresses are only for reaching me, and do not signify > official stationery. Views expressed here are either my own or plagiarised. > > > -- > Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] < /dev/null >
