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.
