I want to thank Patrick, Dmitry and Mark for providing orientation sufficient to make some headway. The Handbook simply says
"If etcupdate(8) is not able to merge a file automatically, the merge conflicts can be resolved with manual interaction by issuing: # etcupdate resolve While not wrong, it's certainly less than the whole story 8-) It's unfortunate that the example posted was a trivial case, certainly I didn't tamper with BSD.tests.dist and tf was the correct response. If I'm understanding correctly, the file presented by the df and e options contains essentially all possible versions, delimited by <<<<<<<<<<<<<, ||||||||||| and >>>>>>>>> characters. Once edited, that will become the new local version of the file. If this is mistaken please say so. bob prohaska
