diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'doc')
| -rw-r--r-- | doc/diff.texi | 8 |
1 files changed, 7 insertions, 1 deletions
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 |