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author | Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> | 2007-07-19 18:26:38 +0000 |
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committer | Jim Meyering <meyering@redhat.com> | 2009-11-11 14:08:06 +0100 |
commit | 4805ca767a3c9b20deede49b2e4b294e58a28325 (patch) | |
tree | cd879660ea5f44b71b631be881a18551b053012a | |
parent | 7e7a52f33be97ba6ae5ffcca4c504f243ecc12eb (diff) | |
download | diffutils-4805ca767a3c9b20deede49b2e4b294e58a28325.tar.gz |
* doc/diff.texi (White Space): Note that newline always ends a line,
so -w doesn't ignore newline-related changes. Problem reported by
David Kastrup.
-rw-r--r-- | ChangeLog | 4 | ||||
-rw-r--r-- | doc/diff.texi | 8 |
2 files changed, 11 insertions, 1 deletions
@@ -1,5 +1,9 @@ 2007-07-19 Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> + * doc/diff.texi (White Space): Note that newline always ends a line, + so -w doesn't ignore newline-related changes. Problem reported by + David Kastrup. + * COPYING: New file. * AUTHORS: Update from GPLv2 to GPLv3. * Makefile.am: Likewise. diff --git a/doc/diff.texi b/doc/diff.texi index a80dd43..2a17231 100644 --- a/doc/diff.texi +++ b/doc/diff.texi @@ -309,7 +309,7 @@ Here lyeth muche rychnesse in lytell space. -- John Heywood $ The @option{-w} or @option{--ignore-all-space} option is stronger still. It ignores differences even if one line has white space where the other line has none. @dfn{White space} characters include -tab, newline, vertical tab, form feed, carriage return, and space; +tab, vertical tab, form feed, carriage return, and space; some locales may define additional characters to be white space. With this option, @command{diff} considers the following two lines to be equivalent, where @samp{$} denotes the line @@ -320,6 +320,12 @@ Here lyeth muche rychnesse in lytell space.-- John Heywood$ He relyeth much erychnes seinly tells pace. --John Heywood ^M$ @end example +For many other programs newline is also a white space character, but +@command{diff} is a line-oriented program and a newline character +always ends a line. Hence the @option{-w} or +@option{--ignore-all-space} option does not ignore newline-related +changes; it ignores only other white space changes. + @node Blank Lines @section Suppressing Differences Whose Lines Are All Blank @cindex blank line difference suppression |